- A 10-year-old artist’s work is booted from an exhibition. Seems to me the reasons given for removing it are the very reasons it should have stayed.
- A history of the Raggedy Ann doll. Why care? Well, turns out the story involves some very contemporary-sounding issues about vaccines. Caveat: Three different sources give different accounts (others here and here). The latter is the most dramatic and so much at cross-purposes to the other two that it makes one’s head spin. Or maybe it’s just government spin.
- Hm. I’ve heard sociopaths sound sound just like this after being caught: trivializing the pain of victims while melo-dramatizing themselves as the true sufferers.
- Anarchism in the Asian highlands? Did hill tribes make a deliberate choice to leave behind many advances of civilization, just for the sake of being left alone by the state? So says a new book by Yale scholar James C. Scott. Other scholars differ on the details. But … interesting premise. And one that might just resonate with us back-to-the-landers. Equally interesting: This very thoughtful Boston Globe article treats anarchism respectfully as just one of many life choices, one of many possible political systems.
- Angela Merkel bails out Greece. What’ll that do to the Euro?
- Man from the future turns up at the Large Hadron Collider. Says there’s a desperate problem with chocolate in our future.
Uh, you did notice that the Large Hadron Collider story was filed on April 1?
Philalethes. Of course!
Okay; sorry.
Regarding indigenous peoples staying clear of civilization, here’s a very interesting article about such a tribe in the Amazon: the Pirahã, who’re just not interested, and whose unique, fascinating language is providing some much-needed challenges to the arrogance of the self-nominated Pope of linguistics, Noam Chomsky.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett
http://llc.illinoisstate.edu/dlevere
http://llc.illinoisstate.edu/dlevere/Piraha/vids/index.shtml
(videos, pictures, sound files)
On this continent, the Hopi (and many other tribal groups) tried to keep to themselves. They looked at the White Man’s world and saw “koyaanisqatsi” — insanity piled on stark, raving psychosis, a life path of compulsive, compounding busyness that can only end in disaster — and wanted none of it. But the White Man wouldn’t leave them alone; they were crushed and inducted by force into what we’re now calling the New World Order, a.k.a. Civilization (from the Latin cives, city).
Hopis once thought nothing of running 20-30 miles in the morning to get to their corn fields; now most of them are sedentary and diabetic. Still, they remain isolated, and retain at least some of their genetic endowment and traditional wisdom, so that they might survive the Collapse and return to something like the life they had, which worked well enough for a thousand years before we so generously “helped” them.
The modern “Western” / Euro-American idea of the “purpose of life” — to amass ever more material comfort and toys, never mind the cost and effects on the rest of the biosphere, which is only “dead” matter of no significance beyond its immediate usefulness to us — is only a very recent development, and no more sustainable than any serious disease.
The traditional Hopi thought the purpose of human life was to keep the world in balance and harmony by scrupulously correct behavior (the word “hopi” means “well-behaved”) and careful observance of the round of seasonal ceremonies. They had no idea of “progress”. They weren’t going anywhere.
And where are we going so frantically? It’s no accident that our ruling class just keeps taking bigger and bigger doses of the same drugs; it’s all they (and we) have. The real Drug, of which all drugs are merely instances, is Credit — “something for nothing”. The perfect paradigmatic symptom of our disease is “Daylight Saving Time” — as the old Indian put it, “the white man cutting an inch off the top of his blanket and sewing it onto the bottom to make it longer.” It all would be hilariously laughable if so much suffering were not involved.
Oh, that’s okay, Philalethes. No worries. People do fall for some pretty goofy spoofs on April Fools Day. But a visitor from the future wearing tweed and warning of chocolate communism? No, I don’t think so. 🙂
I just thought it was funny because so many strange and dire things have been predicted re the Large Hadron Collider.
I have to agree with Philalethes. That item should have come with an April Fools warning. Being April 4th, my guard was down. I have come to accept that in the future there may be shortages of food and clean water, probably living in a Fascist Dictatorship with no privacy, no rights, no guns, no personal freedom…event fashion that includes tweed and bow ties, but NO CHOCOLATE?
I just read the Monday topics without visiting the links. I got to the last item and had to drop everything, jump in the pick-up and search out the nearest Wal-Mart. I cleaned out the shelves of all the leftover Easter bunnies, and chocolate eggs to be melted down and used as some future currency in a very bleak future.
I should have read the whole article.
G.W.F., I think you might have a case for suing me for … oh, I dunno, mental duress or something. Facing a future sans chocolate would indeed be enough to send a normal person into a frenzy. But what about facing a future with too much of it?
In either case … Ah feeeel yr pain. Mistakes were made. I’m sorry I gave the appearance of wrongdoing. And other declarations of … whatever those are declarations of.
That bit on Zomia was interesting for sure, and I’ll be picking it up eventually. One of the (few) benefits of growing up in east Los Angeles in the 80’s was coming of age with refugees from S.E. asia. Tribesmen of the Hmong, Karen, Laos, and of course run of the mill Vietnamese in my classes taught me some valuable lessons, albeit from distant/detached observation. Chief among them was that communism [spit] and the totalitarianism that it breeds comes skipping down the path hand in hand with genocide and brutality. One could possibly make the case that the native American cultures were doomed as a result of an expanding nation. Not so with the tribesmen of rural asia. Red thugs went well out of their way to kill/ subdue them because their FREEDOM WAS DEEMED AN AFFRONT.
Another lesson learned was much more positive and (cover your ears Claire! 🙂 ) inspirational. In kindergarden these kids often had no shoes and wore the same clothes every day. One friend had no front door on his house (!!!). By the time I was in junior high their families often times were living pretty high on the hog due to extraordinary amounts of hard work and discipline.