Among many things that the post-industrial modernity inflicts on people. Not only it caused disease by confining people into buildings without the sunlight. It also causes the shift in the natural bi-modal sleep pattern. Again this is something I wrote about before but now even BBC magazine came around – The myth of the eight-hour sleep.
A while ago on the advice of Paul Jaminet I stopped wearing any shades outside. And now there is the mounting evidence about the importance of the natural sunlight – NYT. In this context it’s time to ponder why, for over a hundred years, buildings and especially work environments have been deliberately designed to ignore and even block out windows and the natural sunlight? Just another crime of modernity.
In 1912 D. H. Lawrence eloped with Frieda Weekley (nee Frieda von Richthofen) to Germany. D. H. Lawrence stole Frieda from his literature professor as she abandoned her then husband and children in England (letters of note). Here is the best part where D. H. Lawrence unloads on his countrymen:
“…Could I wring three ha’porth of help out of his bloody neck. Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime.
I could curse for hours and hours — God help me.
***
Why, why, why was I born an Englishman! — my cursed, rotten-boned, pappy-hearted countrymen, why was I sent to them. Christ on the cross must have hated his countrymen. “Crucify me, you swine.” — “Put in your nails and spear, you bloody nasal sour-blooded swine, I laugh last.” God, how I hate them — I nauseate — they stink in sourness.”
There is also a letter Richard Feynman wrote to his young and dead wife in 1946, sealed till his death in 1988 (letters of note).
When people speak they tend to swap elephants with mice. They say religions are about “beliefs” but they forget to mention that the practical, day-to-day religious emotion is guilt. Every religion as it’s method bans or objects to one of the natural human drives and desires. This creates the fundamental tension as a mere human has to summon all the energy on the manufactured guilt. The flip side of this arrangement is that it opens the back door for the real elephants to comfortably walk in.
Take the western nutritional habits. Look at people around you, they are constipated with the manufactured guilt about fat, eggs, red meat, etc. In other words all the nutritional foods that out body craves because humans evolved to digest these foods easily and they pack the vital nutritional punch. No, these foods don’t make you fat; instead carbs, glutenous bread, sugars and the processed, chemically enhanced food make you fat. At the same time while the “consumer” is preoccupied with stripping his food of the most flavorful and nutritious morsels, at the same time the elephants of the processed, sugary junk walk in unmolested. And there is a lot of it, pretty much everything on the inside of a supermarket. On the perimeter there is fat, meat, fish, fresh produce but on the inside is mostly poison, guiltless poison.
Facebook is as ubiquitous and as inevitable as the suburbia, it is also as deadly on the soul.
Illustration via gapingvoid
It’s interesting that still no a single person at Goldman went to prison after all the damage to the economy and millions of Americans. Instead the Justice Department was busy helping the Oligopoly donor to stage a show trial of the lowhigh-level “russian” programmer (was makin 400K at Golmand and ofrend a job in Chicago three times his Goldman salary) who used to work for Goldman. Sergey Aleynikov’s case overturned today! – NYT Felix Salmon writes – Aleynikov goes free:
“Goldman could have brought a civil case against him, but instead they got their wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. government, to come down on him so hard that he ended up with an eight-year sentence. Violent felons frequently get less.The forthcoming decision from the Second Circuit is likely to be a doozy; I’m told that the judges shredded the prosecutors during the oral hearing. And certainly their decision to enter a judgment of acquittal, rather than any kind of retrial, is a strong indication that they handed down this order with extreme prejudice against prosecutorial overreach.”
Cohen's Blessing, Alter Jüdischer Friedhof an der Rat-Beil-Straße - Frankfurt a/M
There is yet another article from John Gray about Alain de Botton’s secular religion (New Statesman). I think both Alain de Botton and John Gray are lacking the first-hand experience with the institutional religions and the totalitarian state variants of the institutional religions (Alain de Botton is Swiss after all), they both overemphasize the religious values for an individual and shove under the carper the role of religions as the agents of the deliberate social manipulations. The latter was the target of Marx’s ‘opiate’ remark and the primary role of religions throughout history, indeed till the liberal democracy confused the issue with placing the burden on the individual “belief”. Failing to delineate between the distinct realities of religions as a state and religions as a psychic coping technique, John Gray yet again muddles the argument.
P.S. It just occurred to me: I suspect John Gray (and perhaps even Alain de Botton) is a mason, that would explain his motives. Heck the masons already created Alain de Botton’s version of a “secular” religion, temples, rituals and all, long time ago. On the other hand, the Masonic creed was central to the institutional enlightenment and even the state enlightenment (US, France, etc.). Can John Gray get away with hating the enlightenment and still being a mason?
photo via flickr/SRuehlow
Photographer: Benjamin Antony Monn. Location: Bibliothèque nationale de France. This photo was taken on July 10, 2011 using a Nikon D800.
Enlargeable photo above. If enlightenment had a church it would have been a library. That Oval Room in the Bibliothèque nationale de France is the late addition built in 1896. My hunch is that it might have been inspired by Jules Verne. There is the nautical theme of a giant submerged submarine, complete with what looks like the diver helmets at the base of the double columns (perhaps the air supply). Nothing distorts the sight of a historic library as the pale, plastic computers. There is sort of a symbiosis between the nouveau-baroque and the industrial but the computers violate the pace and the beauty, they don’t belong in that world.
1965, Gershom Sholem in his library in his house on Abarbanel St., Rhavia, Jerusalem.
David Assaff published the photo. It’s a different scale but not less impressive. Jules Verne was a romantic who traveled far away to the imaginary submerged worlds. The great Gershom Sholem found the submerged worlds on the margins of these books. His library is now open to the public (Wikipedia).
Rabbi Ben Gurion writes it’s from “Avoda Zorah”, nu, nu… Can someone please look it up in Hoshea, what is actually written there? You can see how the socialist founders of Israel where completely in the grip of the tradition. It’s not enough to say that you should call a man and woman the same “equal” name, he has to bring some made up a posuk… Not just any “posuk” but from the PC Neviyim.
“The process of making mice look like elephants, has, as a necessary side effect, the result of turning real elephants into mice” – Nassim Taleb on “mental displacement caused by press” (media).
Felix Salmon takes off from the story about Toxo, I linked to it yesterday. He writes that allegedly “within 36 hours of being uploaded to the Atlantic’s website, the story had already amassed half a million pageviews — and was “well on its way to becoming the most visited piece ever” in the history of the site.” This means that the Toxo story is going to beat out the former all-time-Atlantic-most-read-piece on Introversion by Jonathan Rauch.
So not unexpectedly, “more is more” on the internet, yet the key ingredient is missing from Salmon’s analysis, it didn’t have to be that way. It is all because of the single structural flaw in the way the Internet evolved into a free and ad-supported medium. It is still avoidable, as Jaron Lanier highlighted again in the NYT:
“The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers. This belief in “free” information is blocking future potential paths for the Internet. What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions? If all content were valued instead of only mogul content, perhaps an information economy would elevate success for all. But under the current terms of debate that idea can barely be whispered.”
By the way, did anyone notice that as the content volume increased in the NYT, it is “less and less” of what to read there, never mind the pay-wall, their flawed strategy is still volume.
How Kosher Food Turned into Poison
by Ben Atlas on 02.21.2012.10:16pm · 0 comments
David Assaf took this photo in the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem. Here they are, the rabbinical courts of Manchester, London, Eida Hareidis, etc. They should be placing a warning label on this poison, instead there is the shameless seal of approval. Long before Natasha Campbell-McBride, the Jews had an advanced idea, emotions and mind start in the gut. They where wrong about most of their restrictions, but they have to be given credit for trying. Now for multiple reason there are about ten times more processed food in a Kosher shop compared even to an average American supermarket. The word Kosher turned into an immoral farce.
Here is the Rebbezin Kuk works the chalah, starts at the 2 min mark there. ►click to continue