There is a very funny Jack Black sketch in one of the series of films with his side Kick when he invents something called inward singing. He claims and then proceeds to demonstrate that you can get twice the amount of feeling into your singing if you sing when you breathe in as well as when you breathe out. It’s a funny notion and the title here Back to Work and Enough is enough refers to the paradox of getting back to work might need to be achieved by Not Working.
I support the RMT action and feel a more widespread pushback is required against the Technocratic spreadsheet jockeys and their ridiculous time and motion theories.
As I am coming back up+ to the 3rd anniversary of the re-launch of the Old RLD business and group of companies now in the form of Home@ix Group. I have returned to work and done very little else for the past 3 years. I enjoy work and the sense of mission that Home@ix brings with it has been great fun and hugely rewarding. Along the way, I have drawn upon a well of learning garnered from 17 years of experiences accessible by not having had to work.
Anyway just some links, the context in which I mean them I will explain it another day.
The Six Ways on Sunday, Carbon Currency end game 16 to 1 on, what are the odds of that?
These are the ones I place here as problematical, Cassandra, Senecca Effect ; Bardiesque shall we say?
Society and Politics in 2100 – Part 1: Speculations on a Very Different World
Society and Politics in 2100 – Part 3: Democracy, Nations, and Technology
Climate Skeptics Point to World Population as the Real Problem
Society and Politics – Part 4: The Empowerment of Individuals and Social Groups
Growing the Economy is a False Narrative in a Resource and Climate-Change Constrained World
That is the side of the story in the Dominant Narrative I refute it Thus, and across this blog I criticise this timonistic and Misanthropic Narrative against The Human Race.
My own influences and Heroes come in for criticism too Like this.
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/cornell-west-idiot-chief
In case you wonder how West’s mind came to reach this odd point of convergence between Chekhov and Christ, he is happy to explain the intellectual path that led him to such dizzying heights of insight. “Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human – a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives,” West writes. “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos … My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O’Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov … And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms’s ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’” The conservative writer David Horowitz rightly asses this screed of self-importance as “worthy of a character out of Moilere.”
Perhaps, if President Obama had only spent a little more time listening to the Brahms “Requiem,” or scratched his Gnostic itch a bit more, all would be well. But, I doubt it. For, as West admits, his problems with the President exist not only at the level of ideas. He was unable to secure tickets to the inauguration for his brother and mother, and Obama does not return his phone calls. There it is. Cornell West, unable to matter in the world of ideas because he has none, wants to matter in the world of politics, but he can’t get his phone calls returned. “My personal words had to do with being disrespected by the President,” West recently tweeted. Sorry, Professor: You have spent a lifetime disrespecting yourself by the rank stupidity of your writings. I am glad the President does not return his phone calls. I wouldn’t either.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Obama, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”
The quote isn’t originally about Obama, although every single part of the statement can be found, explicitly or indirectly, in the government’s defense in the Snowden/NSA scandal.
Replace “Obama” with “Hitler”, and you have the original. It’s from Milton Mayer’s classic They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, and the words are those of a university colleague of the author, explaining “the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.”
Oh well, maybe the USA isn’t a fascist state after all.
My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.
from Race Matters. Cornell West.Now about that inward singing.
