what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Passing Thoughts

My partner complains that I now spend all day with my bum in a chair and my face in the laptop and there is no doubt that our minds and body must be affected by our new style of communication……
One of the interesting literary sites to which I’m now subscribed is Brainpickings which turns out to be run by a young Bulgarian now working in New York and who shares her working methods here. I’m not sure if her "wobble board" and other devices quite fit the needs of an old fogey like me but I was sufficiently intrigued with her mention of the “Pocket” app to give it a test run…At the moment, my library facility is simply a “copy and paste” of relevant URLs which I insert in a word file. We’ll see what value this organizer can add……

It was Adam Curtis who made me realize last year that I should be paying more attention to documentariesGood documentaries require a rare combination - knowledge of the subject; experience of filming; appropriate selection and editing of text, images and music; and appreciation of how to fit them together, One of the best websites for challenging documentaries must be Thought Maybe – which I thoroughly recommend.
You might also like this list of the best 50 documentaries of all time - from the excellent Sight and Sound journal. Trouble is, I feel, that they take 30 minutes to say what can be said in 5 at most…

Mainstream media and blog sites are so awful in their slavish repetitions of political conventional wisdom that a search for “alternative sites” seems a suitable response. But where to begin? A few weeks back I reported on my findings about readable journals
Yesterday’s post identified (for me) some new UK sites of which Another Angry Voice was most promising – if a bit shrill. And, by definition, “alternative” sites and mags are….well… “tribal” ie closed to the idea of plurality, generosity or cooperation. Google “anarchist”, “revolutionary”, “green” and other epithets and see if I’m wrong.

Which is why I’m currently more disposed to read the stuff which comes from the commons network eg this paper on policy options for the EU which came in today 

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