===
If you can see through G.K. Chesterton's work to know where he is engaging in sophistry, and where he is being brilliant, then you are well on your way to fruitful explorations of the world.
"To know solves only subordinate problems, but learning protects against tedium." Don Colacho. Now that's a manifesto, right there.
"Hemmed in by language and horizons of time and space, reading is always a stylising of past reality." John Keane
Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter: "I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I’m not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues . . . Tolstoy’s moral philosophy has ceased to move me . . . Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat.”
If glass were invented today, it would be hailed as this amazing technology that could be 3D printed using . . . sand itself! What a disruptive technology! Let's get some start ups going, and bid up their price to earnings somewhere between 800 and infinity (which would be the case if they had no earnings -- because who needs earnings when you are dIsRupTIve !?!)
Links/research
===
I've been getting into mechanical toys again. This has lead me to the marvelous Paul Spooner -- one, and two videos. How is this for an artistic statement?
As well as all the cars, clocks and other machines that make our lives efficient and comfortable, there are quite a lot of machines that have no practical use at all. Machines that are the antithesis of practicality, made by artists who have no interest in efficiency or comfort. They often make machines that express their anger about the dehumanising mechanisation of war, policing, bureaucracy or about the increasing distance between people who seem always to be on the phone but seldom talking to those next to them.My machines are even more useless than those because I’m not even angry, having led an easy life in a beautiful country doing pretty much as I please all day. I make machines about things I find funny or absurd, hoping that others will feel the same. Even if I am a little annoyed when I start making something, the feeling has usually worn off by the time I’ve finished.
Video compiling David Lynch arguing that habits and routines free him to be creative.
The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area (33)I found the Intelligence Squared YouTube channel. Seems good to give content to listen to while I do chores.
I don't know if this is a rabbit hole I want to go down, but there are claims to co-ops handled the last global financial crisis better than traditional for-profit companies.
. . . Lead to list of worker cooperatives, which lead to this line, which I found amusing "Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse is a radical infoshop . . ." (It's worth saying that when it comes to anarchist stuff I am such a MOP. It's not my thing, but I find it interesting to look at).
