i didn't grow the splash
of apple-cider vinegar
i didn't grow the sheen
of olive oil i didn't grow
the garlic
the kale sown
the red mustard greens
the purslane cultivated
from volunteer generations cut
today behind the fence where
the rabbis watch
but i tasted them all
deliberately vague, telling the court: “I am not proposing to say anything else which may alert potential defendants here or abroad to the nature and the ambit of the criminal investigation which has now begun.”Now, I'm no barrister, and so do not know the appropriate authorities under U.K. law. Naturally, I assume there to be rules of some sort that are more or less parallel to those major U.S. laws with which I am marginally more familiar. Of course not the Administrative Procedures Act or such, and obviously not those laws pertaining to health care (though the relevant accounting regs must be similar), but two laws pertaining respectively to organized crime and national security: RICO and the Espionage Act, both of which leapt to mind immediately upon reading the quoted passage.
I think it is important to say that Zizek and cultural critics increasingly see differences between East and West dramatically diminished as Asia has been absorbed by global capitalism. Asia might be the geographic origin of Buddhism, but the distinction is of little importance as the world becomes modern, Westernized, and the hegemony of global capitalism has become total, worldwide. So it is not surprising that Zizek would maintain that Buddhism globally is becoming Western Buddhism—and increasingly functions as a fetish that ultimately enables the status quo to maintain its continuing control, dominance, and expansion.
If Buddhism is finally about liberation from ignorance and errant views, both individually and collectively, then we might consider studying not only what we are but also the culture that invisibly influences and dominates us. Quite apart from advocating any alternative to the current system, we may discover sources of suffering and new patterns of desire and ignorance that are embedded in our actions. The study of capital would quickly become the study of suffering and false consciousness. The study of capital and the revelation of the conditions for what we might call an “emergent communism” could supplement our contemplative approaches as the movement of the real.
The lesson here is that the transformation to a different system does not have to be catastrophic. Of course, the situation I’m describing would be a revolutionary one — but it wouldn’t have to involve the total collapse of the old society and the Promethean conjuring of something entirely unrecognizable in its place.
At the end of the process, firms no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate. Since firms still buy and sell in the market, they can still generate a surplus (or deficit) that can be used to judge their efficacy. But no individual owner actually pockets these surpluses, meaning that no one has any particular interest in perpetuating or exploiting the profit-driven mis-valuation of goods that is endemic under capitalism. The “social democratic solution” that was once a contradiction – selectively frustrating the profit motive to uphold the common good, while systematically relying on it as the engine of the system – can now be reconciled.
My list is kind of long, but mostly out of ignorance. I have been using the RedFin mobile app to search listings for detached houses south of gaithersburg (and White Oak) under $300K (but, $250K would be preferable), and tending toward four digits in the square footage (though I find that number often-misleading and therefore confusing). While there are a lot of listings, a preponderance of them note "pending." Among those remaining are a broad array including estate sales, short sales, public auction, and various references to third-parties, banks, tear-downs, and as-is's and other daunting terms: I'd prefer not to immediately have to replace the fusebox and the roof.
In general I've focused in Rockville along the train tracks, where several houses along Lewis St., and in the neighborhood beyond, seem modestly plausible, and across the swath from Viers Mill over toward Hyattsville. I like the idea of a couple listings in Takoma Park, or near it; there's what looks like a lovely little house on Sligo Avenue; and one or two extravagant outliers down in Fort Washington which appeal for plausible proximity to the river.
But I don't have a great sense yet of what my money might get me. In comparing listings, I find some turn-ons, as it were, and turn-offs and several consistent considerations, foremost among which is the commute. For a car, driving into the city is the certain to be dreadful from any entry point, so I have a strong preference for living within a reasonable walking distance of a metro station or high-throughput bus route.
Turn-ons: AC, W/D, dishwasher, potentially-comfortable sunroom/patio zone, parking, an environment amenable to supporting a satisfactory illusion of privacy (also, although I can hardly cook, some of those kitchens look magnificent!);i then appended my top ten listings from the despised redfin app, by listing number and street address.
Turn-offs: HOAs, restrictive covenants, neighbors homes looming through windows, used carpet everywhere.
Once upon a time this idea of having a trained disciplined cultivated memory was not nearly as alien an idea as it seems to us today. Once upon a time people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.In his address to a TED conference, Foer effectively presents some of the rich .history and tradition of the "memory palace" technique, to which I once elliptically referred while destructively writing in this space, and explains that the key to remembering is
to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, meaning, and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in light of all of the other things that you have in your mind.Here, Joshua Foer presents "Feats of memory anyone can do"
But . . . we are no longer talking about theoretical alternatives to corporate rule. We are talking with practical urgency about an obvious need. Now the two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones” in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.
. . .
That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies. In my region and within my memory, for example, human life has become less creaturely and more engineered, less familiar and more remote from local places, pleasures, and associations. Our knowledge, in short, has become increasingly statistical.
Dear Oomph,I, more or less impotently infatuated with another woman, was stunned. Had Cathy Crazed really thought there was something between us? How had Cathy Crazed thought this? Had I in any way encouraged it?
Because you bring out my weirdness, and my weirdness is problematic for me,
I'm afraid we'll have to have some time apart. It's not you; it's me. Sorry.
Cathy Crazed
