Good Morning!

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day.



So here are a few poems -

Caterpillar
by Christina Rossetti

Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry,
Take your walk
To the shady leaf, or stalk,
Or what not,
Which may be the chosen spot.
No toad spy you,
Hovering bird of prey pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.


Transformations
by Thomas Hardy

Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

ICT

ICTs - Information and Communication Technologies are my thoughts and concerns of the day ,and in particular something i have been rather complicit in ,selfies.

Every day Facebook users upload 350 million photos, Instagrammers share 95 million photos and there are 3 billion Snapchat snaps. A central element of visual sharing online involves 'selfies' - which often generate more comment than anything else. But why this fascination with images that can often be repetitive and unimaginative? Do they feed a culture of unhealthy narcissism, as critics assert, or are they a more complex cultural phenomenon?  Also,are we public by default and private by huge effort?

Also, why are some people turning their back on the use of any information communication technologies?

Discuss.

Ooh La La!

I have been refreshing myself with a period of history around the 1790's - the Franch Revolution , a subject that i read on a second level arts course with the O.U way back in the late seventies or early eighties. The free refresher course at Open Learn is around 16 hours of study.

I also want to dig into this heavy tome i have had for years now and felt daunted by it for no reason.



At around 900 pages it is quite comprehensive!

Book 67 - Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine"

Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine" (Penguin)







Naomi Klein is very good at connecting the dots left unconnected by our corporate media. In The Shock Doctrine, she takes on an even bigger subject: something she dubs "disaster capitalism."

The book's anti-hero is Milton Friedman, the recently deceased Nobel-winning economist who championed "free markets" while deriding any and all government control over big business. For this Friedman was lionized by corporate America (of course), and by the seventies, his disciples had control of the U.S. government...which is proof, among other things, that government is merely the shadow cast by big business over society (as said John Dewey).

Friedman's scorched-earth economic theories are often championed as a force for "freedom," but Klein lays out the plentiful evidence that "free markets" really only create freedom for capital and the tiny minority that controls it -- everyone else is left destitute. So how have they come to dominate large sections of the globe, from Russia to Asia to South America? Through shocks -- coups, economic blackmail (cf. the IMF and World Bank), natural disasters like recent tsunamis, 9/11, and so on. Basically, since policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many cannot be made attractive to a democratic majority, democracy must be subverted in order to set markets free.

Klein explicitly compares economic shock to the torture methods developed for the CIA in the 20th century, the same ones that were used in Iraq and at Guantanamo right now and the techniques of an economic/military power must use in order to enforce the kind of free-market subcontractor zone we've created in Iraq. People will not accept slavery, not even economic slavery unless broken -- and so proponents of Chicago School economics have happily collaborated with despots like Pinochet, Yeltsin, or Putin calmly accepting the murder of innocents and the impoverishments of millions as the cost of creating a pure, unfettered marketplace (for themselves).

A lot of things made a lot more sense to me once I read this book -- economics is not a science (no matter what economists say), but it is truly dismal, and my ignorance of free-market theory made it impossible for me to understand many "shocks" that have happened in my lifetime. The Shock Doctrine is an essential book, in my opinion.

Good Night