… are quite red from all the rubbing.
Here are a few items that have had my head swivelling back and forth, even as I rub my eyes:
Where’s the middle ground between authoritarianism and democracy?georgelakoff.substack.com
As much as to say that you can neither be somewhat pregnant, nor somewhat fascist, and that that “fair and balanced” crap is just that, a fence on which to sit so as not to alienate anyone, especially paid advertisers.
This resembles some of the work of the Savory Institute in rehabilitating land using integrated animal management to enhance the soil biome, increase plant diversity, deepen root masses and store carbon.
A figure from the past shows us something about the trajectory on which we find ourselves, in large part because of the influence of those bent on control and private gain, in this case, the military and arms manufacturers, in our current pass, those same as well as entrenched fossil fuel concerns, bankers, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Health, and a slew of governments and their attendant bureaucracies who are all too comfortable denying reality.
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/12/22/Why-I-Stopped-Giving-Food-Bank/
One of my primary bugaboos of late, wherein people directing society seem willing to slough of responsibility for the remediation of the ills created by a throwaway attitude towards whole segments of civilization and pass that on to the charity industry, composed of people wanting to do well for the less-fortunate, but having morphed into huge bureaucracies who look increasingly as though their real raison d’être is to ensure its own continued existence, rather than the elimination of the circumstances that cause poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, energy poverty and the like.
https://nor-re.blogspot.com/2022/12/failure-pure-and-simple.html
Owen Gray riffs on an article from Andrew Nikiforuk, an author not at all afraid of staying on point when the slogging is glum, frightening and depressing, on the state of our interactions with the COVID pandemic, and the willingness of our leadership to gloss over the harm for the economic benefits that wide-open business confers on us, or those that survive. There is also the little Montaigne quip in the header graphic about cowardice being the mother of cruelty that is worth a bit of contemplation in passing.
Here is a piece that draws some neat parallels between some work that needs to be undertaken to ensure biodiversity in nature and how that approach might apply to a stultified and stagnant system of governance that builds in the exclusion of discussions of the most pressing problems and any likely real solutions, Much of this stems from the scaffold of regulation, law, and tradition put in place to support our current economic/social/environmental paradigm.
How do we address economic stress? We increase the tension, and in such a way that it had negative impacts on those most likely suffering already and leaves untouched the hoards of of them that’s already gots. This brings on a ton of thoughts about the nature of money and how it can be used as a weapon, as well as how we might revise our conception of wealth, its accumulation and distribution.
There is never a shortage of mental fodder for the serious grazer.