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Economics
New Year
Icy rain and wind outside; inside, my back’s / To the bedraggled human shape asprawl / On the comfy corner sofa at the Starbucks
January 2010December 2009
You’d think someone as productive as I am could learn how to stop worrying and be happy. But the black dogs of depression keep nipping at my heels. Women haven’t cured me. Sigmund Freud hasn’t cured me. Nor have all the self-help books I’ve read, or the legal and illegal drugs I’ve ingested, or the spiritual big shots I’ve met who’ve told me God is right over there; no, a little to the left; now back up a step; you forgot to say, “May I?”
December 2009Sunbeams
October 2009You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.
The Decline And Fall Of The Suburban Empire
James Howard Kunstler On Reshaping The American Landscape
I hear two themes that both represent a big fantasy. One is the techno-triumphalist fantasy that assumes we’re going to invent our way out of our problems: some mythical “they” will come up with a techno-rescue — a new miracle fuel to keep the cars running, or something like that. The other fantasy assumes that we’re going to organize our way out of this mess. Both tend to ignore the likelihood that we’re going to be living in a more disorderly society with a lot of people who are unhappy and perhaps violent and who are going to be making disruptive political claims.
October 2009
excerpted from
Small Is Beautiful
Economics As If People Mattered
Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on worldwide systems of trade.
October 2009Sunbeams
September 2008The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
Judgments
When I was sixteen, Father and three of his friends bought a huge swath of Willamette River bottomland, and we became, overnight, the largest asparagus growers in the Pacific Northwest.
September 2008
Future Zarahs
The Peace Corps doesn’t send volunteers to the countries where we work, those anarchic Fourth World places where the globalization beast barely pauses to wipe its lips — places like Sierra Leone in 2004.
September 2008
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