Sunday, June 7, 2015

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Friday, June 5, 2015

pulp fiction magazine cover art

Distributism - Third Way Politics

Distributism

A third-way that works.

Hillaire Belloc and GK Chesterton

Distributism is an economic and political philosophy that is an alternative to both capitalism and socialism.

Opposed to laissez-faire capitalism, which distributists argue leads to a concentration of ownership in the hands of a few, and to state-socialism, in which private ownership is denied altogether, distributism was conceived as a genuine Third Way, opposing both the tyranny of the marketplace and the tyranny of the state, by means of a society of owners.
Distributism is an economic system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by as many private owners as possible for the purpose of self-reliance for its citizens.
Distributism is concerned with improving the material lot of the poorest and most disadvantaged. However, unlike socialism, which advocates state ownership of property and the means of production, distributism seeks to devolve or widely distribute that control to individuals within society, rejecting what it saw as the twin evils of plutocracy and bureaucracy.
The ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralised under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). As Chesterton said, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”
Some have seen it more as an aspiration, which has been successfully realised in the short term by a commitment to the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity (these being built into financially independent local cooperatives and small family businesses).
Naturally, it follows that Distributism favours the principles of industrial democracy and the cooperative model of business.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

Master of Two Swords

Miyamoto Musashi

The Words of Leopold Kohr

“Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers.”

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Aliens by Stephen Hawking

daring greatly

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

~ Theodore Roosevelt

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

the greatest story ever denied

Monday, June 1, 2015

We Todd did

I am we Todd did

I am Sofa King

we Todd did

repeat

Sunday, May 31, 2015

clouds

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Small C Capitalism by Russell C.J. Duffy

Common sense has been hi-jacked by coin counters. The human spirit is being crushed by excel spread sheet experts. Artisans have been usurped by administrators. Businesses debased by bookkeepers. Accountants and auditors adulate at the altar of commercial avarice. Being big is best but being biggest is better.

Communism collapsed under the constraints of central control. It was a system that ran against human nature. It made no allowance for ambition; it paid scant regard to individuals championing collectivism over character. Capitalism constantly crashes concerning is itself less with the beings that created it concentrating instead on its core function that of profit and loss and less with heart and soul.

“The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul." – Robert Handy

The machine is now the master, its mendicants merely members of the mainframe. Hayek was wrong. Capitalism should work for the workforce. It was designed to initiate greater freedoms not grant remote control. Allowing the tail to wag the dog serves only the fleas who feast on its labours. Nor is the machine of capitalism a symbiotic entity. It is a tool that serves society or at least that was the intention. Allowing it to flex then fade, grow then die like a beast of burden in some industrialised jungle, effectively letting it reap the seeds it has sown impacts on those that engaged its engines in the first place. The serfs serve forced to run a servile life on the wheel of industry.

Sometimes it feels that the horse we have employed to pull our carriage runs where it will without paying any heed to where we try to steer it.

Too often political parties’ kow-tow to the whims of business ignoring the desires of the people they have been elected to represent. The C of their capitalism is large and harsh when what is needed is a soft c, a round c, a small c that regards the community as much as it does the market place. No intelligent individual wants revolution but the revolving doors of the system we live with keep spinning. Recession precedes growth, bust follows boom - ad nausea. Capitalism is good but good is not good enough.

We need to get back to where we started. We need to return capital to the pockets of all but without collective government control. The big C’s of Communism and Capitalism both employ this method, The latter less than the former but far more than is required. We need entrepreneurs not empires. We need to recognise talent then let it earn its own rewards. We need to recall when small was better than big then re-establish this ethos. We need to have communities that control their own lives rather than continue to consort with corporates whose collectivistic ideal is killing the communities that created them in the first place.

We need small c capitalism in the form of co-operatives; small c capitalism in property ownership; cooperation alongside competition not the crushing of communities by corporations; the return of apprenticeships and of artisans. Small c capitalism is big C common sense.

Originally published on Russell C.J. Duffy's blog - http://fishywords.blogspot.co.uk/

Friday, May 29, 2015

Zulu Girl

Zulu Girl 1951

Vladimir Tretchikoff

There be Aliens

Whether you believe in UFO's or not is a moot point. Personally, I have my own opinions on that matter. The one thing both I and those UFO watchers share is the certainty of life out in space. Mathematically, when you realise how many galaxies there are, how infinite the universe is yet conversely small, for what is size but a man made creation, then the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life becomes abundantly clear. We are not alone.
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