Matthew Henry John Bartlett

My summary summary of John Key’s State of the Nation speech:

NZers used to be rich. We’re slipping way behind. Labour’s fault. Groceries, gas, and houses are getting expensive. Australians have better wages and tax cuts. Carbon emissions are going up. The underclass continues to grow. National will be tough. Many youth are in trouble. Many on welfare, many idle, many violent. We’ll make sure they’re all in training or work. We’ll give the Youth Court more power, and fund ‘fresh start programmes’. National is positive & pragmatic. We face facts. We have high expectations. We’ll move on from the tired debates of the past. NZers deserve better.

What would you like our government to focus on?

Eric Schlosser (of Fast Food Nation fame) on the prison-industrial complex [via NRT]
Burning Man and the gift economy
Eye of the Fish is spawned from WellUrban

Eisenhower said:

[There is] a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.

Wendell Berry said:

I think that human dignity … depends on not knowing everything. I think that you and I have a measure of dignity and are granted a measure of dignity because just anybody cannot presume to understand us entirely, and that dignity, that mystery, seems to me to be infinitely worth protecting.

Thanks for coming to the engagement party. We had a ten out of ten time.

Bill Gates suggests revising capitalism (the score 5 comments are worth reading)

More on lazy NZ newspapers
Tree of life loses limb
Jeanette Fitzsimons’ State of the Planet 2008 speech

In a LongNow seminar, Roger Kennedy said:

When talent emerges it is a sin not to cup your hands around it and help it on. That’s about all I think one learns from the study of history, or the decline of cultures: somebody needed to help somebody a little more.

Eric Gill said: “The object of work is holiness.”

We watched The Darjeeling Ltd. It was very pretty, strange, funny, underneathy, Indian, colourful, spectaclesy.

Russell Brown in MediaWatch mode on National spin spin
Tom Beard’s ascension

Canada apologises for telling the truth
Israel works diligently to destroy Palestinian society
US economy looking ill (maybe it needs to fall over if increased consumer spending is current hope of the nation)
Arsehole New York bankers receive only $180k bonuses this year
<200-word design messages

mhjb.co.nz spexial giveaway! One pair new red size 8 high top No Sweat (chucks rip-off) sneakers (courtesy one Eliza Jane Avery). Sing out if you’d like them.

The Plan B economy

Compendium of Wendell Berry quotes

Stanley Hauerwas quoted his friend Enda McDonagh as saying “I am neither a pacifist nor a just war theorist, but a disciple of Jesus.” This is good because it is less abstract than the two alternatives, it stops one separating ‘convictions’ from practice, and it helps one think in terms of attempts and process rather than achievements, engendering humility.

Art and education [via Jonathan Milne]

Webstruxure has a blog
GM acknowledges oil peak [via Rob A]

We watched American Beauty last night. Deceptively pretty, vapid, incoherent fluff with nothing to teach us.

Robert Pirsig, in Lila: “Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear.”

Wes Jackson, speaking at Duke Divinity School, in conversation with Wendell Berry, quoting Ben W Smith: “We need wilderness as the standard against which to judge our agricultural practices.”

The gift economy

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals (via Kim Stanley Robinperson):

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Characteristics of the Paleolithic life according to Kim Stanley Robinson (in his GoogleTalk), many of which are like to make you happy:

• spending the day outdoors
• walking and running
• looking for things
• making things
• throwing rocks
• cooking and eating
• talking and listening
• singing and music
• dancing and sex
• finding a mate
• raising kids
• looking at fire
• seeing by moonlight
• killing animals and
• being killed by animals
• making beds at night
• exploring new land
• feeling emotions, including terror, religion, right and wrong, etc.

GW Bush’s economic legacy

I have a 60mm refracting telescope which I don’t use. If you’d like to borrow it for an indefinite period, let me know.

Will Willimon on Christmas in empire

Gandhi said:

I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice, the law of suffering. The Rishis who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence were greater geniuses than Newton, greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms they realized their uselessness and taught a weary world that salvation lay not through violence but through nonviolence… The religion of non-violence is not meant merely for the Rishis and saints. It is meant for the common people as well. Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law – to the strength of the spirit… I want India to practice non-violence being conscious of her strength and power…