up all night to get lucky
Sunday, December 21, 2014 | Posted by P at 1:04 PM |
This is a bit harsh, especially since it’s reasonable that people who study Kafka for a living use their work on Kafka to keep getting to work on Kafka for a living.
| Posted by P at 4:35 PM |
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.
Backcountry Yurt Skiing
Friday, November 14, 2014 | Posted by P at 6:49 PM |
Midnight Lightning
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 | Posted by P at 9:28 AM |
I managed to live in Camp Four for an entire summer on $75. Others lived there much longer on nearly nothing at all. - Lynn Hill Climbing Free
Forget the Shorter Showers
| Posted by P at 9:17 AM |
Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”
Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.
I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.
So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.
Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.
The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”
The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.
The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.
Source: Forget Shorter ShowersWhy personal change does not equal political change by Derrick Jensen
Frédéric François Chopin Has Never Smiled
Monday, October 27, 2014 | Posted by P at 9:03 PM |
Oh Luke Maguire Armstrong knows the Muffin Muffin Muffin Muffin Muffin Muffin Man. Oh yes, he knows, Oh yes, the Muffin man, Oh yes,. Luke is an author/musician, Oh yes, the Muffin Man. A raccoon survivor, and one who eats Muffins and a Man Oh Yes who has done educational things.
Hello Sir... Hello... Smart Water Chug....
| Posted by P at 10:52 AM |
“You get to the top of a wall, there’s nothing up there. Lionel Terray, the great French climber called it ‘The conquistadors of the useless.’ Yeah, the end result is absolutely useless, but every time I travel, I learn something new and hopefully I get to be a better person.” – Yvon Chouinard
Then there’s what I remember most about my drive: the stunning emptiness.
Thursday, October 9, 2014 | Posted by P at 8:19 PM |
What? moving to CA? please explain.
| Posted by P at 7:43 PM |
My pockets filled with stones
Oh, I broke his mirror long before
I've raised the bottom to be saved
It's just a shallow grave
I found the season once claimed healthy
Oh, I need the guidance of the lost
It's just a shallow grave
AT&T will pay $110 million to each customer for "cramming" extra charges into customer bills. If you had a AT&T bill you are now a 100+ millionare.
| Posted by P at 6:55 PM |
From Yunnan with Love
| Posted by P at 12:40 PM |
Dinner For Breakfast: Any dinner item works well for breakfast and can provide much more get-up-and-go than traditional breakfast foods.
| Posted by P at 8:13 AM |
Tickets go on sale on Friday, October 3 at noon
Friday, October 3, 2014 | Posted by P at 1:47 PM |
Flamingo Pink!
Thursday, October 2, 2014 | Posted by P at 3:37 PM |
from the person you are in your heart
you can be who you want to be
make us believe in you
keep all your light in the dark
if your searching for truth
you must look in the mirror
and make sense of what you can see
just be
just be
just be
just be
just be
just be
just be
just be
In Search of Nyana
| Posted by P at 11:42 AM |
- Take a slow, deep breath to the point of strain while broadening the shoulders, then continue attempting the inhalation - flexing the diaphragm - for a four second hold. Exhale completely to the point of mild discomfort, then continue exhaling by compressing the upper abdominal muscles and collapsing the shoulders towards the solar plexus. When further exhalation becomes impossible, hold for four seconds and then inhale completely, broadening the shoulders to ensure the lungs can inflate entirely. Collect air in the mouth, then use a sort of swallowing motion to force that air into the lungs. Continue to swallow or pack five mouthfuls of air.
- Don't move at all: any movement burns oxygen.
- Try not to think. Thinking also uses oxygen.
- Get comfortable with your body's responses. How many contractions you can tolerate?
- Expect mild muscular cramps. Whether in your thighs, shoulders or hands, often the increasing acidity of the blood that results from breath holding will cause muscles to stiffen and contract.
- Exhale slowly and repeat.
マツタケ
Tuesday, September 23, 2014 | Posted by P at 1:25 PM |
is it normal to have lots of little things floating in the tea?
Monday, September 15, 2014 | Posted by P at 9:36 AM |
Oeuvres a l’oeuvre
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 | Posted by P at 8:04 AM |
“Eclipsing” is a word which means “blocking the light from,” as the moon sometimes does of the sun. If the reverse were true, and the sun eclipsed the moon, either the moon would have gone on a journey away from earth, or the sun would be so close that the whole earth would shrivel up like a raisin, and we would all die.
Many, many poems are too long; hardly any are too short. - Lemony Snicket
It can be difficult to explain “how long is a day on Earth” because there are many variables. The most convenient convention is to say that it is 24 hours for normal conversational situations.
(You can use a clothes drying rack to dry out pasta)
分福茶釜
| Posted by P at 9:39 PM |
A Pattern Language for Effective Activism
Thursday, July 31, 2014 | Posted by P at 5:00 PM |
- Full House — Stephen Jay Gould
- When Elephants Weep — Jeff Masson
- Freeman Dyson’s Brain — Wired Magazine
- The Story of B — Daniel Quinn
- A Language Older Than Words — Derrick Jensen
- The World We Want — Mark Kingwell
- The Spell of the Sensuous — David Abram
- The Truth About Stories — Thomas King
- Humans in the Wilderness — Glenn Parton
- Against the Grain — Richard Manning
- The Commonwealth of Life – Peter Brown
- A Short History of Progress — Ronald Wright
- (Haven’t found it yet — will report when I have)
The Nine Nations of China
Wednesday, July 30, 2014 | Posted by P at 7:48 AM |
Kaitlin Manning, an associate at B & L Rootenberg Rare Books and Manuscripts, says part of the reason why modern viewers are so captivated by marginalia is because we expect this era to be so conservative. For example, few Monty Python fans realize that the comedy group’s silly animations are direct references to artwork in illuminated manuscripts. (Illuminated simply means decorated with gold or silver foil.)
Drinking Cloud Tea With Aristotle
| Posted by P at 9:00 AM |
The finest and sweetest water is every day carried up
and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region,
where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth.*
And used to make tea.**
[*Aristotle, ‘Meteorology’, 350 BC]
[** Paul Sobczak, 2014 ]
Life is good in the idyllic fairytale village of Nix.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014 | Posted by P at 7:37 PM |
Clint Mansell • Max Richter • Nils Frahm • Hauschka • Machinefabriek • Valgeir Sigurðsson • Dustin O’Halloran • Christoph Berg • Hummingbird • Simon Scott • Marcus Fischer • Peter Broderick • Black Swan • Rival Consoles • Lawrence English • Kate Carr • Ólafur Arnalds • Waves On Canvas • Maps And Diagrams • Dalot • Good Weather For An Airstrike • Leah Kardos • Ezekiel Honig • Mark Templeton • Radere • Fabrizio Paterlini • Netherworld • Talvihorros • Pleq feat Strië • Antonymes • Brambles • Clem Leek • Minus Pilots • Olan Mill • Ian Hawgood • loscil • Bersarin Quartett • Hammock • M.Cadoo • Jóhann Jóhannsson • Rafael Anton Irisarri • Helios • Mike Jedlicka • Christopher Willits • Celer • :papercutz • Dakota Suite • Kreng • Anoice • Takahiro Kido • Yuki Murata • Aria Rostami • Peter Prautzch • The Frozen Vaults • riverrun • pinkcourtesyphone • David Wenngren • offthesky • Autistici • A Bleeding Star • Kane Ikin • Sun Hammer • Roel Funcken • Wabi Experience • Jase Rex • James Murray • Scanner • Erik K Skodvin • Julien Neto • Absent Without Leave • Last Days • Stray Ghost • Trifonic • Marcus Fjellström • Gen Ken Montgomery • David Newlyn • Boy Is Fiction • SaffronKeira • Ben Lukas Boysen • Somatic Responses • Évo Lüthi with Monolyth and Cobalt • Ex Confusion • Seth Chrisman • wndfrm • Infinite Scale • Floods
Sadhus of India.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | Posted by P at 6:42 PM |
Notable natives and residents:
Les Claypool
Nick Gravenites
Mickey Hart
Kitarō
Alicia Bay Laurel
Terence McKenna
Robert Nichols
Max Thieriot
Tom Waits
More people than live in Kenya have seen this video about kenya on youtube.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 | Posted by P at 5:39 PM |
Not really but the population of Iceland is only 320,000 (including Bjork, Sigor Ros, Amiina, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Emilíana Torrini, Múm, Of Monsters and Men and ... Valgeir Sigurðsson. Iceland is the same size as Lexington, Kentucky, how many artists are from Lexington?
Paul Sobczak's invitation is awaiting your response
Monday, March 24, 2014 | Posted by P at 3:45 AM |
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