1. 27 July 2008

    130 days ago

    There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness. In a civilization which requires most lives to be passed amid inordinate dissonance, pressure and intrusion, the chance of retiring now and then to the quietude and privacy of sylvan haunts becomes for some people a psychic necessity. The preservation of a few samples of undeveloped territory is one of the most clamant issues before us today. Just a few more years of hesitation and the only trace of that wilderness which has exerted such a fundamental influence in molding American character will lie in the musty pages of pioneer books… To avoid this catastrophe demands immediate action.

    Bob Marshall (1901–1939)

  2. 02 December 2007

    368 days ago

    … je me suis apercu que de tout temps j’ai ete obsede par l’impossibilite de me rendre compte de certaines actions ou pensees soudaines de l’homme sans l’hypothese de l’intervention d’une force mechante exterieure de lui.

    I realized that I’ve always been obsessed with my inability to understand certain abrupt actions or thoughts of man without hypothesizing the intervention of some malicious force acting outside of him.

    Charles Baudelaire on the Devil

  3. 15 July 2007

    Deer Hunting with Jesus

    Joe Bageant

    508 days ago

    Wonderful bit of writing on the ignored population of America – poor whites. Living in small towns, working paycheck to paycheck, being born again and again into christianity, voting defacto republican, etc. They’re where Bush can draw enough of the electorate to have ever managed to b e our president, despite his utter incompetence. People for which it comes to pills or heating oil. I’ve met precious few of these.

    Bageant can take a look at these people with better perspective than most, having grown up in the small town spotlighted in the book, where he lives for a second time. But between he’s been places, moving west, getting college educated, moving through hippy circles, living on the Coeur d’Alene indian reservation, and in big librul towns. He can love and understand these people, while wanting to smack them for the idiocy they’ve been raised into.

    Bageant himself describes the book: “one part cultural anthropology and part splash of cold water into the face of those liberals wondering why their working-class brothers and sisters seem to have turned against them.”

    Backed by the faithful support of hardworking American Christians who seldom fully comprehend their leadership’s agenda, zealous evangelical leaders will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the founding masters of the covert kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. The 2008 elections, regardless of the outcome, will not change the fact that millions of americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis. Maybe the philosopher Nietzche was right “one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity — one must first be sick enough for it.” 190

    Over the past twenty-five years a boatload of America’s for-profit hospitals migrated to nonprofit status because it is more profitable. 231

    Liberal or Conservative, the average American spends about one-third of his or her waking life watching television. THe neurological effects are profound. For example, researcher Herbert Krugman famously demonstrated that television viewing makes the right brain hemisphere twice as active as the left, releasing a surge in the body’s natural opiates—endorphins, including beta-endorphins and enkephalin, all of which act on the same brain receptors as opiates. Other research shows suspension of critical-thinking skills. Meanwhile, we watch television pleasurably, believing we understand what we have watched, believing we are always in control of the experience and are not unduly influenced by it. 256

    Our culture is based on two things: television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie [an actual person from Winchester] or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we revive the conditioning required to sustain out acceptance of the state brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, war as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects og the corporate sponsored hologram. 262

  4. 29 June 2007

    524 days ago

    But now I have to get serious, and how do you get serious, you make a powerpoint, you know. Homage to the office package.

    Hans Rosling, New insights on poverty and life around the world

    (It’s a talk about global levels of poverty/development/whateveryoucallit. Watch to the very end, tremendous.)

  5. 12 January 2007

    People, Land, and Community

    693 days ago

    Collected Lectures of the E.F. Schumacher Society

    A nice set of ecological/economical/environmental lectures on how we ought to deal with the disaster that has befallen the earth. I think these are all posted to the internet in case you might want a closer look.

    I agree with most of the ideas here, but don’t really see being able to jump from mainstream american life into bioreigonally/sustainably/old-fashioned homstead culturing my own patch of earth for the rest of my life. I really like the idea of breaking down the gigantic structures of society into locally comprehensible bits, but then how the hell would I be able to order shit off amazon.com?

    Kirkpatrick Sale – The Colombian Legacy

    For there is no longer room to doubt that now, five hundred years later, the subcontinent of Europe – and all the continents it has peopled and all the cultures it has touched – represents a society in crisis, a crisis, like the previous one, of spirit as much as of substance. The industrial world, the European-culture world, of which this nation is a preeminent example, is sickly, miserable, melancholic, anguished, without a faith to believe in, institutions to trust, or values to rely on, victim of the disease I have called “affluenza,” the frenzied amassment of packages and products to the point where not only is the survival of the human animal in real question but the survival of all oxygen-dependent species and indeed the living earth itself. We have as a culture subscribed to the theory of progress – it is time to cancel that subscription. 17

    Affluenza is a token way to frame the West today. I’m not convinced that more is better – but surely what we have today is impressive! But is it worth the tremendous distress we’ve put upon the earth to obtain it.

    Winona LaDuke – Voices from White Earth

    Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, “man” can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. 28

    If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a palpal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. 32

    John McClaughry – Bringing Power Back Home

    Merely going to the polls every two years or four years to cast a ballot for one or another television personality who happens to be running for office is a pretty cheap version of citizenship. Voting on a state referendum question, as Californians are famous for, is also a fairly insubstantial form of citizenship.

    By citizenship we mean active participation in public affairs at a level such as the town or neighborhood where the individual’s contribution can be appreciated and can count for something. The small human community, celebrated by Aristotle and Lao Tzu, the place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community – that is where citizenship resides.

    By contrast, in a society that is planned to be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents1,” you are no longer a citizen but rather the subject of a central power. Once we become subjects, we lose those sparks of humanity and democracy and freedom that have made this country such a great country in world history. 137

    Ah, wouldn’t it be nice.

    1 Declaration of some governor of Vermont:

    Our governor, a rather liberal and well-meaning woman who wants good things for everyone, gave a speech last January in which she called for “a new era of planning” for our state. Her words in describing the new era were that it will be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents.” It could have been Benito Mussolini in Milan in 1922.

    Wendell Berry – People, Land, and Community

    To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly. Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. And let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the “informed decision.” 144

    What works poorly in agriculture – monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting – can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugates nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order which in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible. 150

    Wes Jackson – Becoming Native to this Place

    ...in a certain sense all we have to do is figure out a way to stay amused while we live out our lives as inexpensively as possible within the life support system. It’s what I call “the Mill-Around theory of Civilization”: if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won’t do much harm to ourselves r the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up all the earth’s capital? Or stated otherwise, how do we make our vessel so small that it doesn’t take much to fill it? Should not this be our journey? 155

    I don’t know if I can agree with this – it seems a very depressed way of stating that we should harmonize with the land. The idea is the right one no doubt, but I can imagine no lack of ways to frame it better.

    Thomas Berry – The Ecozoic Era

    While we seem to be achieving magnificent things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process, but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet at the most basic level of their functioning, we have endangered all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral development of human life itself. 193

    Point number one in my cynical worldview: “Man we’re fucking this place up. Hey! TV shows!”

    The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. 196

    Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living beings. For him, the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There could be no communion with te birds or animals or plants, because these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism came into being. 197

    ...the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration – thus the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity (including economics). 198

    The entire pattern of Earth’s functioning is being altered in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however, the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire modality of Earth’s functioning. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be one blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered, and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism. 202

    Kirkpatrick Sale – Mother of All

    It was not until the development of European science, from about the sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics, chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception held – in fact it proved – that the earth, the universe, and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by the whims of any living, thinking being; that far from being divine and omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and mechanical properties. [...]

    ...[This particular world-view’s] ultimate governing principle – that humans should not merely understand but be capable of manipulation nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature” – became ingrained into not only the scientific but also all scholarly and most popular thinking in the Western world and now shapes the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.

    And if at the end of the twentieth century we see the earth as a static and neutral arena that is alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest; if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented elements and capable of plundering its resources, befouling its systems, poisoning its air (perhaps irretrievably), and altering its eons-old processes to suit our wishes… if this is our condition, it is so because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the universe in these past four centuries, we have accepted it virtually in its entirety. It has become the foundation and sustenance not only of our various social systems – education, agriculture, medicine, religion, energy, communication, transportation – but of our most basic economic and political institutions as well.

    To be sure, the scientific world-view is not without its values, its uses, its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place for our knowledge of hygiene, say or radiotelegraphy or immunology or electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers have by now become obvious, and it is surely sage to say that the path of sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been “organized out of our thinking,” as he puts it, “by the modern world,” and we must listen to the two great teachers, one “the marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community, as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to those with other skills – for the human being, a Mark Twain might have said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or needs to. 218-220, phew

    David Orr – Environmental Literacy

    Finally, had Bok so chosen, he would have been led to question how we define intelligence and what that might imply for our definition of an “educated” person. From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tents to fragment things and focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so clearly computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic. 241

    John Todd – An Ecological Economic Order

    Shakespeare: there are sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything. 268

    Stephanie Mills – Making Amends to the Myriad Creatures

    Earth Manual – How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming it 286

    David Brower – It’s Healing Time on Earth

    We do not have a democracy in the United States. Any country where only half of the eligible voters are registered and where only half of those who are registered vote and where only half of those who vote like their choice is not a democracy. Any country that isn’t ruled by its government, that is ruled instead by the Fortune 500, isn’t a democracy. And any world government that is ruled by transnational corporations isn’t a democracy. yet such is the state of our national and global governments. According to my definition, a corporation is, right now, by law, a lawyer’s attempt to create something that can act like a person without a conscience. If you are a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors of a corporation that bypasses an opportunity for profit, you can be sued by the stockholders! There should at least be something written into law that says you can bypass it for sound social or ecological reasons. 290

    He makes a good allegory squeezing the 4.5 billion years of scientific history into the 6 days of biblical creation history. Humans didn’t come about until 1.5 seconds before midnight on the sixth day.

  6. 02 December 2006

    Holding Doors

    734 days ago

    Something about it bugs me. I don’t know what it is in the gesture, maybe an archaic indication of inferiority, a ‘ladies first’ sort of thing. Maybe an indignant I really can handle the door on my own. Maybe a feeling that nobody should be inconveniencing themselves at my expense, however small their gesture. A look over the shoulder and a pop to keep the door open is what I do, and all that I’d expect from anyone else. It’s not like I ignore that someone is right there behind me or don’t watch out for other people. Every once in a while I’ll even wait a second for a stranger who isn’t right behind, but a few seconds. Even then holding the door as they walk through is just too much for me, I’ll let go and move on to allow their passage over the threshold.

    But whenever someone holds the door for me (today it was a certain biologist super-blogger), provided that it’s a double door (common in chilly minnesota), I’ll hold the second door for them. And I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but there’s always a ‘take that’ smirk on my face. Just desserts. I’ll show you and your all too polite ways.

  7. 29 October 2006

    768 days ago

    The essence of tragedy is not the doing of evil by evil men but the doing of evil by good men, out of weakness, indecision, sloth; inability to act in accordance with what they know to be right.

    I.F. Stone

  8. 01 May 2006

    949 days ago

    The Bridge

    Film on suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge:

    It happens all the time. Highway Patrol Officer

    via Kjell Olsen949 days ago

  9. 29 April 2006

    Things I hate

    951 days ago

    • Breathing audibly: There’s nothing more annoying than breathing above a certain noise level. I’m not talking about yawning or sighing or anything, just breathing loud enough that I can hear you while sitting a reasonable distance away. And not just a few times, but for a sustained period. Can you even think over that sound? I sure can’t.
    • Making noise while you walk: Along the same lines above. Flip Flops really get me. Try walking behind someone flip flopping along and not wanting to kill them. Esp. on linoleum or concrete. Also shoulder bags hanging too far down the back and thumping against the leg at each step. Multipliers for the amount of jingly shit (buttons, coins) you have on/in the bag.

    These things are annoying. Breathing and walking are things you just do – they shouldn’t make noise. I can’t imagine what things would be like if I couldn’t ever get away from my own noises.

    I can’t really think of anything to call this sort of noise, but the things that characterize it are it’s being completely unnecessary (breathing through a stuffed up nose would cause the first) and fairly prevalent.

    Somehow related to my abhorrence of this kind of noise (especially when it’s attributable to fashion) is my hate of people who never take their iPod out of their ears. Can’t you just enjoy the five minute walk between engagements? What do you have against the sound of the wind or the chirping of birds?

    Don’t get me wrong, I love the iPod like any good apple devotee. I’d venture to guess I’ve had an iPod longer than most1, but it won’t often get pulled out until I’m on a bus or something for 30+ minutes. Those earbuds2 don’t make you look that cool, and can you really enjoy music when just listening in 5 minute bursts?

    1 I got mine when it was a nerdy thing to have, not a fashion statement. My first iPod was a 2nd generation (with the circle buttons above the wheel) and I got it 3+ years ago. I’m not exactly sure, but way before I got this website.

    2 I’m quite tempted to get a pair of nondescript black buds because I’m embarrassed that fashion has appropriated my nerdy apple goodness for it’s own nefarious purpose. But mine work just fine, and there’s no way I’d spend money to join some fashion trend, much less surrender to one.

  10. 23 April 2006

    956 days ago

    Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in the affairs which properly concern them.

    Paul Valéry

  11. 10 April 2006

    Posturing

    969 days ago

    Man do I hate it when people act fake. By acting fake, I mean doing anything I don’t like. I’m just an asshole, and I need to justify my not liking people somehow.

    But the thing that gets me most, aside from fashion in general, is when someone drops their voice to answer the phone. Talk normal, for christ sake.

    THANKS.

  12. 04 January 2006

    1066 days ago

    The New Yorker: Shouts and Murmurs

    This is no game.

    via Kjell Olsen1066 days ago

  13. 23 December 2005

    1077 days ago

    What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge—the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.

    Please, don’t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you—and now I have to guess—about ten to one.

    Kurt Vonnegut, Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

  14. 06 December 2005

    1094 days ago

    The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ...A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

    Thoreau

  15. 02 October 2005

    1160 days ago

    Perfection of Democracy

    As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart

    via Kjell Olsen1160 days ago

  16. 28 September 2005

    1163 days ago

    Opiate of the masses

    But where do beliefs come into all this? Religion maybe, but won’t blind allegiance to any social club lead to the exact same thing? Is it just me, or do a significant amount of people eschew thinking completely?

    via Kjell Olsen1163 days ago

  17. 19 August 2005

    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

    Mark Haddon

    1203 days ago

    Told from the point of view of a fifteen year old autistic, I was disappointed when I found out the author was neither 15 years old, nor was he autistic. I think it’s fascinating that there are people who can do such an amazing amount of brain push ups and yet not even deal with other people.

  18. 08 July 2005

    1245 days ago

    The Democratization of History

    Millions of us have online journals—or, at minimum, send email—where we can take notes about what we’ve experienced, visible to anyone who is interested. Millions of us carry cameras with us wherever we go, allowing us to record events as they happen. Millions of us are now historians.

    via Kjell Olsen1245 days ago

  19. 18 June 2005

    Graduation

    1266 days ago

    I graduated from High School last tuesday (the seventh). I’ve been meaning to write a little about it, but I just haven’t been able to – I really don’t feel different at all nor do I have much to write.

  20. 1266 days ago

    (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything... (plasticbag.org)

    The simple addition of structure and mechanisms for ease of publishing have made the comparable form of expression on weblogs so fluid and quick that it borders on speech. In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us – through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear.

    via Kjell Olsen1266 days ago

  21. 16 April 2005

    1328 days ago

    We are animals: evolution humans philosophy physical education

    Denying our animalhood keeps us out of contact with forces, processes and experiences that keep us healthy. And, since the natural world is the source of our life, health and fitness, denying our status as animals is like cutting off our own air supply.

    Kjell Olsen1328 days ago

  22. 10 February 2005

    1393 days ago

    Smart People Choke Under Pressure

    A study proves it: a math test was administered under little pressure to a group of college students, who were then divided into two groups according to their scores (high vs low). The same test was then re-administered under a high pressure situation – they were told that their team depended on each of its members to score well and the team which scored higher would win a prize.

    On the second time around the score of the higher group dropped significantly to the same level of the lower group, which didn’t change at all.

    Since working memory is known to predict many higher-level brain functions, the research calls into question the ability of high-pressure tests such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT to accurately gauge who will succeed in future academic endeavors.

    I’ve never been good at handling pressure, but interestingly, I’ve had most of my problems under pressure while playing tennis. I just can’t win matches – I can take a 5-2 lead then blow it like that. Maybe that’s why the best jocks are dumb!

    But what I want to know it: were is the research that helps you not worry yourself sick?

    via Kjell Olsen1393 days ago

  23. 24 January 2005

    1410 days ago

    Craigslist and cottage industries (kottke.org)

    Interesting look at how craigist affects businesses, I ought read over more carefully and think about this.

    via Kjell Olsen1410 days ago

  24. Also somewhat recently

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