Not a bad view...

Not a bad view....

beautiful day in neighborhood

The new neighborhood.

Kerouac on writing, per BrainPicker

I was a Kerouac fan from early on, and growing up not that far from Lowell added to my enthusiasm.  But I never found this before, thanks much to Maria Popova @brainpicker.  Its about writing, but its about a lot more than that, seems to me.

See: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/22/jack-kerouac-belief-and-technique-for-modern-prose/

the new monopolies

So, useful article online in Harpers.  Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets

I've been struggling for a while now trying to figure out how to articulate some of the issues I see with the current state of our economic system and free markets (to use the term loosely).  This is is good thought piece and serves as one framework to understand some of the current  impediments to growth.  Sometimes it seems to me we're spending most of our national economic policy efforts in reconfiguring our society and culture into one large no-risk cash machine benefiting a relatively small number of large corporations.

This article also offers a sobering description of the impact on small companies of “Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts” where, in my words, large companies can play small companies off against each other resulting in economic win-lose, not win-win scenarios.  Disproportionally higher returns to larger aggregations of capital, I suppose one could say.

Money quote:

Today, our overlords not only refuse to defend the power they hold—they deny that it is even possible for any American to accumulate such power. And to make such an absurd claim stick, they (or the more politically sophisticated of the academic economists in their employ) have undermined our language itself. Their most impressive act of lexical legerdemain was the coinage of various misnomers, some so audacious as to be worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Corporate monopoly? Let’s just call that the “free market.” The political ravages of corporate power? Those could be recast as the essentially benign workings of “market forces.”

climate change - global warming

For the permanent record:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/

In Like A Lion

change is coming

food/health

I've been trying to find a good way to say this.   Andy Bellatti finds it for me, thanks to Wendell Berry.

Andy Bellatti MS, RD @andybellatti
 "People fed by food industry, which pays no attention to health, & treated by health industry, which pays no attn to food." - Wendell Berry

celebrity

recently found via the web, a line of poetry that applies so frequently and poignantly, from Emily Dickinson:

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

recently, Joshua Tree National Park