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[ by Charles Cameron — somewhere between Lietaer, Bitcoin and a leisure-driven future ]
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Please note, I am not using moolah in the sense in which Arthur Conan Doyle used it in A Desert Drama:

The squat lieutenant, the moolah, and about a dozen Dervishes surrounded the prisoners.

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There’s a quality of surprise to the two tweeted stories that follow, which highlights our usual acceptance of the idea that money is value. Consider:

500 Canadian doctors protest pay raises because they already make enough money https://t.co/ZPXDxHZHLN of Canadian doctors demand lower salaries. 700 physicians, residents and medical students from Quebec had signed an online petition asking for their pay raises to be canceled.

— ???? ???????????? (@angnws1) March 8, 2018

And then, from a different angle:

The listed price for food at a New Orleans pop-up stall is $12. But white customers are asked whether they want to pay $30.

The owners says it's to reflect the city's income disparity. https://t.co/byTH15sAn2

— NPR (@NPR) March 5, 2018

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Conan Doyle again:

But I am ordered to gather you together, for the moolah is coming to convert you all.

[ by Charles Cameron — The Word for World Is Forest ]
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Today I learn that Ursula Le Guin left us yesterday, Google celebrates Virginia Wolff today..

Timing.

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There’s this saying, a door closing opens a window. I wonder what wonders will greet us now.

[ by Charles Cameron — theology and espionage, non-dual — how could i possibly resist? ]
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!!

Thank you, dear friends.

[ by Charles Cameron — how far gone are we — from a sorta leftist-centrist-don’t-really-fit-labels POV? ]
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I mean, Orwell is going to claw his way out of the grave here

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) August 15, 2017

I’m not sure what exactly JM was responding to here, there have been too many pointers..

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I for one don’t think Charlottesville stacks up against Kristallnacht, and am wary of the words Fascism and Nazi. I wholeheartedly agree with JM Berger in his piece today, Calling them Nazis:

There’s an increasingly common argument online against referring to the alt-right by its chosen name. “Call them Nazis” is the refrain. If you haven’t said it yourself, you’ve probably seen other people saying it.

While this approach may be understandable and may suit certain rhetorical purposes, it’s a grave mistake for journalists and experts who substantively study and cover the movement to embrace this approach.

JM continues:

The alt-right category is extremely important to understanding what’s happening in this movement. Nazis are only part of this movement, or more correctly neo-Nazis, since most of them aren’t German nationalists. If neo-Nazis were America’s only problem, it would be a much smaller problem.

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My concern here is with a somewhat different angle, and not specifically with the Charlottesville clashes. I’m noting the widespread tendency to suggest we’re already in Brownshirt territory, if not deeper in than that, and I think it may be a bit premature.

IMO, we need to be cautious in where we draw the lines that say, beyond here is Fascism, or Nazism, it seems to me: exaggeration only serves to discredit those who indulge.

There are real problems, both with overt swastika-wavers and with those who support or merely tolerate them. Which way the wind will blow over the coming few years, however, is yet to be seen.

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However, getting back to Orwell —

— it does seem to me that scooping up more than a million IP addresses of epople who may have an interest in protesting Trump gies way beyond some kind of Orwell Limit.

Orwell kept his resistance movement cellular and basically unnowable: datamining the web blows an enormous hole in that strategy.

I’d have to say that with today’s news about DOJ vs DisruptJ20, one of my personal Orwell Red Lines has been crossed.

[ by Charles Cameron — mathematics and metaphor, a ratio of the irrational ]
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A total solar eclipse in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway, on March 20, 2015 — Jon Olav Nesvold

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From Annie Dillard’s Classic Essay: ‘Total Eclipse’:

Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.

Annie Dillard is one of our great stylists, so it’s perhaps not surprising she came up with this jaw-dropping piece of mathematics, or should I call it logic? It’s a ratio, anyhow:

Seeing a partial eclipse : seeing a total eclipse :: kissing a man : marrying him

By common consent, ratios are usually applied to quantifiables — but there’s really no quantifying seeing, kissing, or marrying.

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I don’t think I’ll be able to make the eclipse, but if any of you can, please do. No less an authority than Annie Dillard — she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and Holy the Firm — strongly advises it.