Worth a few minutes of your time.
Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.
a story telling chart
One graphic might steer imagination 1,000 directions; might automagically teach a kid to write a fine story.
the stock market means nothing
“It’s almost worth the Great Depression to learn how little our big men know.” —Will Rogers
The bottom line is that there can be no rational expectation that things will get better.
…the mini-booms we’ve seen each year for the last 3 years were ephemeral, lasting only a few months. There is nothing mysterious about this in so far as these episodes were necessarily mirages.
These brief outbursts of hope did not rest upon a foundation of fundamental economic health.
Volatility is an expected outcome in an environment in which central banks alternately do and do not bankroll the stock market, which itself is an emotional non-indicator of our economic health.
the mundane is blown away by awe
thought diffusion… Folks say this 2 minutes is worth the click-through. Well?
It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs. —Vaclav Havel
Wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am. —Voltaire
Dance until you shatter yourself. —Rumi
weight of the intolerable universe
I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I leave nothingness to no one. —Jorge Luis Borges
to move a planet nearby
stuff your eyes with wonder, he said
Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, he said, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass. —Ray Bradbury
war is not natural
The drumbeat of fear has begun about potential defense cutbacks.
“America spends more on defense than the next 14 or 19 nations, depending on methodology, and is the world’s largest arms dealer. It is winding down two wars that lasted longer than American involvement in World War II and in both Iraq and Afghanistan the results are disappointing, to put an optimistic spin on it. The money to wage these wars was largely borrowed from Red China, which our defense establishment is now teeing up as the next ‘enemy’.
“The real lesson of these scary reports is that the American economy is far too dependent on military Keynesianism.
“In the past, when wars ended the economy shifted back to a peacetime footing. Sometimes that did cause recessions on the way to more productive growth (a peacetime economy produces more healthy returns than blowing things up). Now we’re being told that’s impossible.
“That sound you hear is Dwight Eisenhower spinning in his grave.”
you will care about you
Love after Love, by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
nobody cares about you
But George Carlin did.
London graffiti via Jonathan Player for The New York Times:
time for easy blogging
The Thought Shopper has bloggeritis 🙂
I’ve been using Twitter lately; nearly entirely because the mouse clicks are easier.
is tomorrow a beginning?
“All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way. Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent, now, completely.
“The individual computing laboratory in every 12-year-old’s pocket is being locked down. If you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves, you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.
“The goal of the network operators is to attach every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment that she can’t learn from, can’t study, can’t understand, can’t whet her teeth on, can’t do anything with except send text messages that cost a million times more than they ought to.”
More notes at Memex…
“Eben Moglen’s ‘Innovation in an Age of Austerity’.
If you watch nothing else this week, watch this.”
romney money
words-R-industries
→gyre →fire →story →allegory →supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Go ‘see’ how you can ‘hear’ a sound file for each of our words. Click below.
https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/de/0/YOURWORD.mp3
neato pictures of skin
Your skin —the largest organ of the body— weighs about 9 lbs, releases up to 3 gallons of liquid each day, and sheds about 30,000 cells every minute.
falling newspapers and their revenue
George Orwell: ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.’
more and more often lately
“I close my eyes, whistle, and send the dogs off into the brush to see if they can scare up any words.” – Brad Zellar
each is a very good year
The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. “What about your dog?” Michels asked. “O.K. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. “I’m grateful for sun. Sometimes.” 
some rants are literature
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today.
Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal.
It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do.
The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.
An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.
Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon.
For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.
a vacuum occupied by myth
Deciphering Ernest Hemingway, er, with a twist:
The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so much of what he wrote for experience, that’s because he set it up that way, signing himself ‘Old Master’ when he was barely 18.
He made the fiction true, including the fiction of himself, and then struggled to keep up with it.
costs per patient discharged alive
1) The cost per patient discharged alive reflects the times.
2) Since 2001, mortality has been level while the cost per patient has escalated dramatically.
3) The post-2000 era, however, seems to be characterized by diminishing returns, with growth in costs far outpacing reductions in inpatient mortality.
and then it all went awry
rape is our invisible war
1) Today: Lawsuit claims rape, misconduct at D.C. Marine Barracks
2) The Daily Mail: 8 female Marines claim gang rape at Washington Marine Barracks
3) CNN: Female service members sue US Military for alleged rape, sexual assault
4) Democracy Now! ‘The Invisible War’ Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic Military
5) Reuters: ‘The Invisible War’ Exposes Wide-Spread Rape in U.S. Military
6) LA Times: ‘The Invisible War’ Sheds Light on Rape in the Military
7) Salt Lake Tribune: ‘The Invisible War’
8) Associated Press: ‘Invisible War’ Examines Rape in the U.S. Military
9) Forbes Women: Republicans Betray Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence
as we learn today’s propaganda
A comment from Goin’ South sums it up:
“What is truth,” Pilate asked.
In this age when the brains, tongues and typing fingers of scientists, academics, journalists and ‘public intellectuals’ are for sale, it’s quite a challenging question.
The truth is whatever you can pay to make it.
Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project, which stands for “Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics.”
Its approach is to provide information about the background and funding sources of well-recognized journalists and pundits so that the public will be in a better position to recognize bias and hidden agendas in their reporting and analysis. You can find a S.H.A.M.E dossier on Gladwell here.
cram your screen with revenue
True search results are far below your screen.
Google is now become synthetic advertising. 