creating underground art

Passed along in email

drugs

The last time I checked, and I've got to check these days, today is Friday, a mere five days since I had a hospital operation that involved a lot of drugs -- drugs that have really messed with my circuitry.

This morning, for example, I woke up after the sun rose -- something I haven't done in YEARS. I dreamed long and specific and not terribly interesting dreams that were teeming with people ... and almost no intellectual or emotional focal point. And earlier in the week, I there was a period where I would wake from a nap and, for a short while, find myself somehow upside down... gravity was up somehow and it was weird. I can read a paragraph in a book fine ... but then need to read it three or four more times to understand it.

My wife assures me that it is the hospital drugs wearing off and I sure as hell hope it is.

I am more accustomed to my other version of crazy.

'the Vatican is not broke"

Is there anyone outside the most mentally defective lunatic who would assume that the Vatican were somehow on hard times? An institution hip-deep in great art, golden statues, castles, palaces and guys wandering around in golden shoes with curly toes on them? Let's be serious, right? They're almost as bad as the English.

And yet here is a BBC story suggesting that -- hallelujah, brother! --"It is important to point out that the Vatican is not broke," Cardinal Pell wrote. "Apart from the pension fund (...) the Holy See is paying its way, while possessing substantial assets and investments."

Poor dears. Always struggling so hard. Sure, they have corruptions, but what good corporation doesn't? They're just trying to get by. Their modesty is admirable. Such nice people.

Pedophilia, the gay cartel, banking corruption?... Boys will be boys.

It's nice to think they found a few million euros squirreled away. That way, devoted parishioners will not be be asked to pony up for "God" or "Jesus" ... although I suspect there will always be another plate that promises a place in heaven and a defense against hell.

General documents WWI Christmas Truce

Passed along in email:

A letter documenting the day when British and German troops laid down their arms, exchanged gifts and played a game of soccer at Christmas in 1914 has been uncovered in England.
The letter, written from the trenches in France by a high-ranking British general to his wife, has been made public to mark the centenary of the truce.

if a prodigy shocks, is she a prodigy

Renowned violinist Kyung-Wha Chung has shocked audiences at the Royal Festival Hall by publicly berating the parents of a coughing child. Coughing is a particular problem for classical performers in the winter months.
An academic paper released in 2013 even suggested that people appear to cough more in concerts than in they do in normal life.
The South Korean prodigy had been absent from the London stage for 12 years, partly due to a finger injury.
But the 66-year-old took offence at a child coughing during her performance of Mozart's Sonata In G.
"Maybe bring her back when she's older," she scolded the parents from the stage.
Anna Picard, music critic for The Times, said the atmosphere in the hall had already been tense, such was the anticipation surrounding the violinist's comeback.
"With one shrivelling put-down, a tetchy atmosphere turned toxic," she wrote in her review.

The prodigy flops -- there, I've said it. The toiling, the straining, the virtuosity, the perfection. The sissies lack daring as they assess the scene. The maestro has not found the lush loving grasses that offer more than a perfected cutting -- the land of faith and love.

A child coughs. Bringing expertise to bear is off my charts. Does the maestro hear a rude interruption or a bit of music that fits in every human way.

Humanity. Music. What could possibly interrupt or incur an uppity riposte?

No one interrupts what cannot be interrupted and the maestro knows this at a bone-deep level.

I'm not sure why this gets under my skin. Perhaps it is that in the land of soft grasses and faith and love, the maestro is no longer "perfect."

bad news, good news

Ran across this:

not cancer

After three or four or five weeks of tests and fidgeting about a potential cancer node on my right lung, the operating deed was done today. They had to play the worst-case-scenario even though they weren't sure. It turned out not to be cancer, and today I feel as if I had been kicked in the chest by some medium-sized, cloven-hoofed animal. A "fungus" was the verdict.

Arrived at the hospital at 7:30 a.m. Monday and arrived back home Tuesday at 1 p.m. That's the most efficient hospitalization I've ever been subjected to.

heavenly hell

There is something blissful, even heavenly, about the helpfulness and convenience and supporting nature of "hell." Like the benefits of "heaven," hell provides a generalized storage space and definition for all the "bad stuff."

In spiritual life, who does not squirm and writhe in an effort to soothe or eradicate the fires of hell? Subtle or gross, the effort consumes page after page of exposition, day after day of effort, year after year of crying out. Hell is no damned joke any more than hitting your thumb with a hammer is some kind of joke.

And yet does anyone sense the overwhelming loss that might occur if hell were to dissolve? There may be lots of praise for this notion -- get rid of hell, attain heaven -- but where the rubber hits the road, where the possibility might actually be within reach ... hell is so comforting and ridding oneself of comfort hardly makes any sense, let alone be truly desirable.

Dante did the Christians a favor with his technicolor depiction of a Disneyland-esque hell. As hell threatened, so heaven was simultaneously burnished. And others inclined towards spiritual prisms did what they could to keep pace with Dante's screen play. Individuals are no different.

But the convenience and comfort of "hell" -- the pit where the wind blows and the shit flies and things hurt like hell -- can't be denied, I suspect. Many are content to let hell light a fuse for heavenly realms ... but isn't that just more of the same: It's like inviting a couple to your party: You like the wife and can't abide the husband, but they come as a set, each miraculously completing the other in ways that please them but don't please you.

Heavenly hell. Hellish heaven. Really, I don't think the blessing of hell should be overlooked, let alone shunned. It's about like anything else: Keep an eye on it and after a while it has the chance to disappear ...

Who ever made this shit up in the first place?

bottled water

Passed along in email:

adieu theaters and stores?

When I was a kid, a "good" Saturday was one on which my mother might drop me off at a movie theater with a friend to see a double feature, two or three serial adventures, several cartoons, Movietone News, and three or four movie previews. It was five hours or more of pure bliss.

One of the thoughts I used to have was, "wouldn't it be neat if you could watch movies at home?!"

And, as if to answer my prayer, along came TV. TV did not supplant the movie theater experience at first.

But these days, the rise of the Internet and the mediocrity of Hollywood and the pure price of the movie house has left theaters increasingly out in the cold. When was the last time I went to a movie theater and come away feeling it had been worth the ten or more dollars for the experience?

It feels as if movie theaters are on a path to extinction.

But today, the same is true for bricks-and-mortar retail outlets. Why go to a store if the on-line shopping experience is both faster and cheaper than fighting the crowds, wasting the gas, and paying more? The downside of Internet shopping, of course, is that the quality of the goods cannot be gauged: Things may look good, but their color or materials or manufacture can also be second-rate, to say the least. Suddenly the convenience of the Internet is the inconvenience of sending things back. Not every store has the integrity of an L.L. Bean, whatever the advertising claims.

And if bricks and mortar stores disappear in the face of the Internet onslaught, isn't this one more respect in which the Internet promotes a self-involved and cut-off life experience? Not that shopping promotes a high degree of social connection, but at least there is a presence of actual-factual human beings.

No more movie houses, no more stores: Letting the imagination run to the extremity of the situation (unlikely), it feels like a new and improved Dust Bowl in which the green pastures of humanity become less and less real and more and more a dispiriting pipedream.

judging a cover by its cover

Every once in a while, usually quite by accident, I bump up against something I have made in the past and before the thought arises that "I made that," there is the thought that "I like that; it's kind of kool." And even, "I wish I'd made that."

And so it was today that I bumped into the book I had once pieced together. It was the cover that caught my eye as it sat in a stack of unattended books I was leafing through.

"That's pretty kool" arose at light speed before the critic could get in his licks. I liked it. And then I realized I had designed it and so, contrary to a considerable body of evidence to the contrary, I was kool as well ... even if it was in the past.

Mind you, it didn't make me want to READ the book. That would have been pushing things. But the design pleased me and I was willing to judge a cover by its cover.

woman plays WWI combat role

• French aviatrix Marie Marvingt, also known as the ‘Lafiancée du danger’, was the first woman in the world to fly combat missions. A world-class athlete who won multiple prizes in skiing, cycling, fencing, shooting and luge, she initially disguised herself as a man and joined the infantry. Once outed as woman, she was removed from the front and volunteered with the air force, flying bombing routes over Germany.  When she died in 1963 she was the most decorated woman in the history of France.

snarky prospects

The closer Monday's operation comes, the less equanimity I feel.

It's not so much that someone is going to enter my body in an effort to improve my health prospects. I am a great believer in the anesthesiologist and his/her ability to ship me off to la-la land while the doctor plies his trade and removes a node on the right lung.

No, the wind that rattles the shutters on this house is the post-op pain and healing and being in an even deeper thrall to this aging body. Two things: 1. It's b-o-r-r-r-i-n-g and 2. I really don't see getting hurt as a desirable prospect ... a prospect I might once have balanced favorably against the prospect of getting somehow "better." A part of me carps, "better than fucking what?"

I'll do it, of course. I'm in too deep now. But I am thinking increasingly of swearing off both doctors and hospitals. It's too late. Let it ride. It's more peaceful that way.

The chickadees skitter from snowy perch to cleared sidewalks below and return to their snowy perch on the bushes inside of which they make a home. That's interesting. The Canada geese honk on their blue-sky highway. That's interesting... not b-o-r-r-r-i-n-g like analyses of "denial" or "fear of death" or other sage applications.

I do want to remember to say thank you to the doctors and other personnel attending to my physical being before the operation: Perhaps that will take some of the curse off my crabby behavior afterwards. Snarky... that's the word I'm after.

loneliness and the wall

In the practice of Zen Buddhism, some students sit in zazen meditation while facing a wall. Their eyes are open, their bodies still and the breath comes and goes.

In life -- the "life" that is somehow not zazen -- human beings likewise face a wall. The moment comes and the moment goes and there is no getting out of it. Whether someone is a Zen Buddhist or not makes no difference: The wall of inescapability is in-your-face whether the eyes are open or closed. Whether delightful or depressing, there is nothing special about it -- the wall.

Just sitting here thinking that I am happy to have (however incorrectly) given Zen practice a try. Zen supports men and women in their sense that investigating the inescapablity is worth the price of admission. In the past, there may have been a lot of trying to escape or trying to hold on and here is an exercise that promotes a simple investigation. It's a habit worth cultivating, I think -- investigating the wall in front of your nose.

Formal Zen practice is pretty weird on the surface -- creating a time when there is less activity, less fight-or-flight. I remember having the crap scared out of me the first time I entered a zendo/meditation hall and saw forty or fifty people sitting still and straight ... a social setting without the social give and take that is more common in group settings. It scared me and drew me in simultaneously.

At the time, I think I was hoping to escape ... escape uncertainty, escape disappointment, escape fear, escape The Loneliness and latch on to some more delighting and safer haven. The wall didn't mind my shenanigans.

Oh well, this is starting to sound like one of those Buddhist come-to-Jesus, snake-oil talks and that's not what I wanted to convey. I just wanted to say that when it comes to the wall, Zen Buddhism was a useful thing to practice ... for me. It offered a tool on and off the meditation cushion. It never broke down the wall and as a result, it broke down the wall... or maybe not.

And I am grateful, if you can say such a thing and sidestep the smarm. Better, perhaps, would be to say, as the Dalai Lama once observed, "it can't be helped."

Dostoyevsky and today's moral fantasy

An interesting BBC article suggests links between present-day "terrorism" by states committed to eradicating "terrorism" and 19th century Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky's view of a tsarist world that had inflicted itself on his own life.

What Dostoyevsky diagnosed - and at times suffered from himself - was the tendency to think of ideas as being somehow more real than actual human beings. It would be a mistake to imagine that we haven't also fallen into this sort of delusional thinking. The wars the West has fought in the Middle East over the past decade and more are often attacked as being little more than attempts to seize natural resources, but I'm sure this isn't the whole story. A type of moral fantasy has been just as important in explaining the West's repeated interventions and their recurring failure.

other times, other memories

As part of an writer profile in today's local paper, the author was said to have gone to an 18th century graveyard in Beaufort, N.C., where, among other things, she noted a worn wooden marker that read (in toto):

LITTLE GIRL BURIED IN A RUM KEG.

George Sand observation

Ran across this today and enjoyed its quiet force:

snowy Thanksgiving

Five or six inches of snow fell yesterday, making today's Thanksgiving-highways that much more congested and infuriating. As usual, my wife and sons will (it's quite early in the day) probably head to New Jersey and a get-together with my wife's kin. I don't travel well or have the energy for long social encounters, much as I may enjoy them initially.

A slice of  yesterday, 8:30-11:30 was given over to pre-op bureaucracy at the hospital where I will have my operation on Monday. Long, bland halls; deliberately flavorless rooms; few, if any, windows; much talk about what 'will' happen as distinct from letting it happen and then getting the hang of things based on experience. The older I get, the less gracious I become in these circumstances: I don't mind if someone has a job to do, but I do wish they wouldn't do it around me. 

My crabbiness was ameliorated towards the end of the day when the pulmonary surgeon who will remove what may or may not be a small cancerous node on my right lung actually called up. We hadn't yet met because the surgeon I was originally assigned to "no longer works" at the hospital and the doctor who called became the pinch hitter. I hadn't cared much for the original surgeon. The doctor who called offered a pleasant flexibility and humor that is unusual (my experience) in the world of surgeons. We chatted. I asked a few questions -- most notably, how long I am going to be kept at the hospital. The doctor made no promises but said his experience with similar operations averaged out a two days. I appreciated his willingness to take a swing at the question even if he couldn't answer the question fershur. I asked the question at all because the conviction is pretty strong: Hospitals sap patients of an interior healthiness that contributes to physical health or healing. I realize it's a conundrum (you have to watch over the body in some quite mechanical ways), but I see no reason not to trim the sapping aspect as much as possible. Get me out and under the sky, and I have a feeling I'll heal much better. But I felt much more at ease after talking to the doctor. He feels like a mensch.

From where I sit, there isn't a philosophy or situation in the world that wouldn't benefit from laughter. But confected smiles are worse than Ebola.

a little wisdom in Israel?

(Reuters) - Israel's president has said a bill promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that would anchor in law the status of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people runs counter to its founding fathers' vision of equality for Arab citizens.
The bill comes at a time of high tensions in Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, where a dispute over access to a religious site sacred to Jews and Muslims alike has ignited Palestinian streets protests and lethal attacks on Jews.
"The formulators of the (Israeli) Declaration of Independence, with much wisdom, insisted the Arab communities in Israel, as well as other groups, should not feel as the Jews had felt in exile," President Reuven Rivlin said in a speech on Tuesday.

healing where wounds are encouraged

Pen Farthing, a former sergeant in the Royal Marines, is reuniting soldiers with the stray dogs they befriended while serving in Afghanistan. Farthing's nonprofit, Nowzad Dogs, has helped more than 700 soldiers from eight countries.

(CNN) -- Staff Sgt. Edwin Caba served in Afghanistan for nearly three years. Like his fellow soldiers, he longed for a sense of normalcy during his tours.

"We'd spend hours not sleeping, and rushing to eat meals, and staying on guard," said Caba, 26.

When a litter of puppies was born on the base where Caba served, the animals provided just the relief he needed.

"You walk in, and the dogs are wagging their tails, jumping on your legs and so excited to see you," Caba said. "You forget that you're halfway across the world, in a desert, with hostile things going on."

suffering as the resistance to pain

To the extent that definitions ever helped anyone to take a leak in the morning, one of the definitions I have come to like is the definition of "suffering" as "the resistance to pain."

I guess I am using the word "suffering" as a Buddhist might, although, with advancing age and facts on the ground, it hardly seems necessary to add the word "Buddhism."

True, the definition above is irritating since there are so many juicy bits to "suffering," so many tears that are wet, so much caring for self and other ... and the word "resistance" suggests an act of will and control where a lack of control is so clearly a key element in complaints about "suffering."

Social righteousness may raise its head and suggest that if there is no resistance, everyone turns into an uncaring blob of existence ... everything serene and taciturn and uncaring. But that would just be more suffering, more resistance.

I wonder what is left when it is impossible to resist and impossible not to resist.

"Going with the flow" is certainly a money-maker, but tends to leave its participants flopping desperately, like a fish on the dock.

religion as a competitive sport

Yesterday, my older son was pleased to be named track coach at the local high school. As I understand it, that makes him some sort of honcho over events like running, hurdles, javelin, shot put, discus etc. Besides being flattered for him, I also wonder to what extent the position is one of those jobs where people get snookered -- nice title camouflaging bureaucratic drudgery.

It also made me bite off and munch the idea of religion as a competitive sport.

I don't mean this in some sort of snarky, critical sense, though heaven knows there's plenty of my-pecker's-longer-than-yours, one-true-faith posturing. What I mean is the inability or unwillingness to see my spiritual persuasion as other than goal-oriented ... get to heaven, get enlightened, become a martyr, etc. Sometimes the approach is crass; sometimes it's subtle and corrupt as a nobleman.

Competing with others is fairly easy to see and address. Competing with myself -- shooting for some brass-ring improvement and the like -- is more confounding. It rests on a lack of faith that whatever spiritual persuasion I have espoused really has any meat on the bone -- that I must keep propping it up and praising it and meeting its demands in order for it to have a real worth.

And perhaps that's the bottom line of religion as a competitive sport: Worth. As long as my persuasion needs to be somehow worthy, to that extent I will be mired in a world in which religion will deserve every snarky criticism it receives.

Competitive sport may be a place to start -- the books, the words, the adoration, the practices -- but it hardly seems capable of crossing any experiential finish line.

rewriting the tax code

Passed along in email (from Huffington Post)

Economists Say We Should Tax The Rich At 90 Percent

 America has been doing income taxes wrong for more than 50 years.
All Americans, including the rich, would be better off if top tax rates went back to Eisenhower-era levels when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent, according to a new working paper by Fabian Kindermann from the University of Bonn and Dirk Krueger from the University of Pennsylvania.

The top tax rate that makes all citizens, including the highest 1 percent of earners, the best off is “somewhere between 85 and 90 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Currently, the top rate of 39.6 percent is paid on income above $406,750 for individuals and $457,600 for couples.
Fewer than 1 percent of Americans, or about 1.3 million people, reach that top bracket.
Here is the conclusion from the report, charted:


What you’re seeing is decades of a more or less strict adherence to the gospel that tax cuts for the highest income earners are good. The trend began with President Kennedy, but his cuts were hardly radical. He lowered rates when the American economy was humming along, no longer paying for World War II and, relative to today, an egalitarian dreamland. To put things in perspective, Kennedy cut rates to around 70 percent, a level we can hardly imagine raising them to today. The huge drops -- from 70 percent to 50 percent to less than 30 percent -- came with the Reagan presidency.

In comparison to decades of cuts, Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama each raised taxes at the top by a historically insignificant amount. Obama also proposed modest tax increases, raising taxes on families making more than $250,000 from 33 to 36 percent, and on individuals making more than $200,000 from 36 to 39.6 percent. These increases failed in the House.

A 90 percent top marginal tax rate doesn’t mean that if you make $450,000, you are going to pay $405,000 in federal income taxes. Americans have a well-documented trouble understanding the notion of marginal tax rates. The marginal tax rate is the amount you pay on your income above a certain amount. Right now, you pay the top marginal tax rate on every dollar you earn over $406,750. So if you make $450,000, you only pay the top rate on your final $43,250 in income. (emphasis added)


A very high marginal tax rate isn’t effective if it’s riddled with loopholes, of course. Kindermann and Krueger's paper is also focused solely on income, not wealth, and returns on wealth are how the truly superrich make a living.

Despite these limitations, Kindermann and Krueger say that a top marginal tax rate in the range of 90 percent would decrease both income and wealth inequality, bring in more money for the government and increase everyone’s well-being -- even those subject to the new, much higher income tax rate.
“High marginal tax rates provide social insurance against not making it into the 1 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Here’s what he means: There’s a small chance of moving up to the top rung of the income ladder, Krueger said. If rates are high for the top earners and low for everyone else, there’s a big chance you will pay a low rate and a small chance you will pay a high rate. Given these odds, it is rational to accept high income tax rates on top earners and low rates for the rest as a form of insurance.

This insurance takes the form of low-income people paying dramatically less in taxes. “Everyone who is below four times median income” -- that’s about $210,000 for households -- “pays less,” Kruger said.

The paper assumes that tax rates won’t stop a future Bill Gates from wanting to start Microsoft. Instead, what it finds is that labor supply among the 1 percent would decline -- translation, they would work a little less -- but it “does not collapse.” That’s because of who the authors assume makes up the top income bracket: celebrities, sports stars, and entrepreneurs -- people with innate talents that are hugely rewarding, but only for a short period of time. They only have a few years to use their skills to make most of the money they will ever make. High tax rates don’t lessen their degree of desire to be productive, the authors said.

Krueger described the phenomenon like this: “How much less hard would LeBron James play basketball if he were taxed at a much higher rate? The answer is not much. “James knows he only has five years,” or so of peak earning potential, Krueger said, and so he will work to make as much as he can during that time. If high income tax rates robbed the would-be 1 percent of their stick-to-itiveness, the paper’s conclusions would change.

And so whether you agree with this paper’s conclusion comes down, to a certain extent, to what you think of the 1 percent of income earners: who they are and why they make so much money. Over the last few decades, a huge portion of the rapid growth of the very highest incomes relative to the rest of us has been driven by rising executive and financial sector pay. The question, then, is if confronted with a vastly higher tax rate, would Jamie Dimon still behave like LeBron James.

Beat Generation artifacts

Jack Kerouac, 1962 file photo

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It's been called the letter that launched a literary genre — 16,000 amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words written by Neal Cassady to his friend Jack Kerouac in 1950.
Upon reading them, Kerouac scrapped an early draft of "On The Road" and, during a three-week writing binge, revised his novel into a style similar to Cassady's, one that would become known as Beat literature.
The letter, Kerouac said shortly before his death, would have transformed his counterculture muse Cassady into a towering literary figure, if only it hadn't been lost.
Turns out it wasn't, says Joe Maddalena, whose Southern California auction house Profiles in History is putting the letter up for sale Dec. 17. It was just misplaced, for 60-some years.

Like the ivy leaves that grow slowly over the once-new university buildings, the past shape-shifts with the passage of time. I forget how many times Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" was rejected by publishers before one of them took the plunge in 1957, but I can remember reading the book when it first came out and thinking that I could see both the energy and inspiration the book provided AND why the publishers had shied away from it.

In Greenwich Village where I hung out with friends, there was a lot of excitement over espresso and cigarettes: Kerouac had broken some conformist boundaries, we all agreed, and we were all of an age to be skeptical of, if not outraged by, boundaries. I don't specifically remember anyone describing the book as "good writing," but I suppose they did: If you like something, it's good, right? I liked the book but wasn't convinced it was all that good.

Now, of course, the ivy of time has grown and Kerouac et al have grown into an intellectual blob described as the "Beat Generation." Following on the heels of the safe and sane, white-picket-fence conformity that followed the gut-wrenching uncertainties and sorrow of  World War II, the beats helped to throw open the doors of imagination and possibility ... and paved the way for the flower power hippies who would follow in their wake ... as well as a school system and lifestyle that turns out dumber and dumber graduates.

As Cassady was an inspiration to Kerouac, so I count Kerouac as an inspiration of my own. But it was nothing literary, for me. His inspiration led me to hitchhike across America twice. Looking back through the ivy leaves, I am happy and a bit surprised I did such a thing. But at the time, and in the event, it was plain as salt: Hitchhiking, like doing a military tour, is only interesting and elevating in retrospect. Hitchhiking is predominantly a matter of patience -- waiting and patience, two pretty good exercises.

Kerouac climbed into a bottle and pointed to wider vistas. I packed a small, dime-store suitcase and stuck my thumb out. Both are now capable of growing some handsome and overblown ivy, for my money.

Funny how the ordinary becomes noteworthy as time passes. Just look at the artifacts up for sale in auction houses.

where the rubber hits the road

Anyone interested in the intersection of American business with bloodbath-prone countries could do worse than watching "Firestone and the Warlord," a Frontline documentary that digs into the question of Firestone's complicity in various wars in Liberia. At one time, Firestone owned the largest rubber plantation in the world in Liberia and provided the bulk of America's tires at a time when motorized vehicles were becoming indispensable.

The company, bought out by the Japanese and rebranded as Bridgestone, saw little or nothing wrong with the financial and moral support it implicitly gave to the power-bent rebels. Their reasoning was based, it seems on A. profit and B. the argument that their organization benefited people who might otherwise be destitute.

I found the video interesting for the clash of templates ... the moral questions of 'using' those who are poor and less savvy vs. the profit questions that make the rich richer and the poor only marginally better off. Firestone did some good things (medical, schooling) for those it touched. But it also funded a philosophical and actual warlord with enormous amounts of blood on his hands.

Gordon Bok

There are a lot of his 12-string folk songs I like, but here are two:

Japan woos youthful recruits

Taking its cue from the United States, perhaps, or from historical trends that refuse to be silenced...

(Reuters) - Japan's military is wooing new recruits with images of smiling soldiers posing like pop stars in a series of photo books and DVDs that tap into youth culture.

Glory, adventure, heroism, patriotism, doing what under civilian law might incur a long prison sentence or the death penalty ... how sexy and grown-up and powerful is that?!

Was it ever different?

lie/cheat/steal in banking

You always knew, but a scientific study has confirmed ...

(Reuters) - - A banking culture that implicitly puts financial gain above all else fuels greed and dishonesty and makes bankers more likely to cheat, according to the findings of a scientific study.

"Peaky Blinders"

Watched the second season of "Peaky Blinders" yesterday. The Netflix/BBC TV serial is a wonderful turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw adventure in England. The characters are etched in ways that American TV serials seem hard-pressed to emulate. The filming is classy.

Worth a look for those inclined.

workers kill plantation owner

Asked about piracy off the Somali coast, a security official commented to an interviewer, "If you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you." I always liked that line and wondered to what extent American capitalists might take note.

In India, the workers on a tea plantation killed the owner over unpaid back wages. Wages had not been paid for two to three months. I suppose western business executives are savvy enough not to let wages lag, but the expectations in this neck of the woods are higher and thus the provocations do not need to be so life-threatening before someone picks up a club.