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POPSJust for the Love of It: Riches beyond Cash
It's about sharing your tools so you all can have access to all the tools under the sun without it costing the earth. It's about using any free space you have to either benefit positive, ethical and local projects, or to enable volunteers to keep doing their amazing work for free. It's about sharing the land you don't need in order to facilitate a local food community. It's about freeconnecting neighbours. It's about learning to help each other again. It's about getting ready for a post peak oil world. It's about making dinner for a friend who was yesterday a stranger. It's about keeping money out of the equation. It's about communicating face-to-face and phasing out technological communication. It's about putting the soul back into society. It's about helping each other not for profit, but just for the love-ofit. What is a Freeconomy? A Freeconomy is a moneyless society in which no money changes and there is no duality between giving and receiving; here they are seen as
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POPSAnti-intellectual Presidency book review One might also question whether public engagement with policy issues was, in truth, significantly higher when presidential speeches were pitched higher. How many ordinary Americans could wax eloquent about the pros and cons of the gold standard in the 1890s, despite the fact that orators of the level of William Jennings Bryan were making the rounds? The electorate that listened to Wilson went on to elect Harding, partly because he was handsome and partly because he made speeches high on pathos. Moreover, his “return to normalcy” mantra used a word many considered not even to exist. Nevertheless, amid the impressionistic plaints so common against the dumbing down of American culture, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency is a useful empirical demonstration of one facet of a larger cultural transformation. In our come- as-you-are America, Dick Cheney’s response to an interviewer’s observation about widespread public opposition to the war in Iraq with “So?” is business as usual. We might di
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POPSScottish Student Orgy Quite normal in a nation which balances dour propriety and abandoned excess. (Just think of Gordon Brown)
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POPSThe Cost of Alcohol in UK A fifth of all hospital beds. These bare figures, dreadful as they are, do not begin to convey the devestation caused by alcohol to individuals and their families.
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POPSSecret Postcards: who's the artist? Just occurred to me you could make yourself a great parlour game. Throw in some images of Picasso, chicken droppings, Pollack, baby vomit, a two year old's scrawlings and a jar of pickled pilchards. Great morth and embarrassments to be had!
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POPSThe Road A major novel. I look forward to the film which is out soon. (By the way, the book is not about the future, it is about now).
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POPSTommy Cooper Jokes - A Celebration Two elephants walk off a cliff...... boom boom! --------------------------------------------------------------------- So I went to the dentist. He said 'Say Aaah.' I said 'Why?' He said 'My dog's died.' --------------------------------------------------------------------- So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up, and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.' ------------------------------------------------------------------- So I rang up my local swimming baths. I said 'Is that the local swimming baths?' He said 'It depends where you're calling from.' --------------------------------------------------------------------- So I rang up a local building firm, I said 'I want a skip outside my house.'
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POPSWhat Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? I'm not unduly excited by the political aspects of this, but wonder under what flag the bitter and broken-hearted will now gather to vent their collective despair?
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POPSThe Genius of Photography vs. Susan Sontag's On Photography
|quote]Sontag argues that the proliferation of photographic practice has long begun to establish within people a "chronic voyeuristic relation" to the world around them. And that therefore the meaning of all events is somewhat leveled to an unhealthy degree. As she argues, this fosters an attitude of anti-intervention. Within this it's felt that the photographer should leave their subject, whether it be a person or an event, to its own devices while being photographed, regardless of the moral character of the subject. The justification comes in the idea that the resulting photographs will be documents, representations of events already in motion, in the name of truth and enlightenment. Sontag goes even further to say that the individual who seeks to photographically record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography Just something I'm pondering.
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POPSMind Beyond Brain Andy Clark’s new book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind), mentioned as a forthcoming title last March in David Chalmers’s blog, is now available. The foreword by Chalmers is online.
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