getting mind back

I've moved back from this gurglacious setup to a 17in laptop at a standing desk. Sitting down is part of the problem.

I have been conscious of the way in which in the last several years the pressures of the smart phone's proddings and the presence of the bigger screen/s at which I type this have been interfering with my capacity to think. We seem all to become more and more dependent on sucking the tits of digital means.

One of the things delivered unto us on these digital devices is called news. But what is this 'news'? With a few exceptions it too seems to have succumbed to undying lemming behaviour, 'journalists' chasing each other over cliffs of nonsense they themselves have erected, cliffs which blind the incessant reader to anything that happened more than a news cycle ago. No one wants reality now, we all want the games.

And now in a blizzard, we lose some of the best members of the Australian parliament, all in a rush. Fear and bigotry vultures remain, with a few good men. The renewed Prime Minister, a charismatic, demagogic, hypocritical, lying, conniving, eroding, manipulative genius (a doctor friend today said "psychopathic narcissist?"), has all but destroyed his party to get the prize. He says he has learned, he says he is a better man, but he really just seems to be doing the same only more. He has a not to be rebutted way of speaking in public, cutely said today he might give consideration to some views some others may offer; others he would vehemently reject. His return has been loud. He is most likely to lead the Labor Party to a defeat in coming elections less dreadful than it would have been under Gillard, Gillard facing an internal and external opponent every day. As to whether this renewed Prime Minister will resign from the leadership after such defeat... well, it would not be on character if he did.

But I digress.... Go here for a good commentary.

I suppose it's not just digression, it's also fury at the way our minds are led astray because of the way we now get news and the way news and attitudes are shaped.

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We face corrosion of the brain personally, not just in the body politic.

This article in The Guardian expresses the problem very well:

...Such are the annoying ironies of work and play in the 21st century: more and more of us are "knowledge workers", doing jobs that require deep concentration, yet we do so on machines that seem deliberately designed to interrupt us all the time and to keep us on edge. Then, in the evenings, we try to relax using similar machines, which all too often whip us up into a state that isn't relaxing at all.
The dirty secret of the internet is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable. ...

 This hit the spot for me, directly.

So...

I have disconnected my phone from receiving mail and news updates. I am unsubscribing from a lot of new news. I am going to try to get the focus onto longer writing projects of my own initiative. More art.
... less blogging???  :-)

 I have refrained from Twittery and Face-painting, declining invitations from whomever. LinkedIn, about which I've giggled a bit here before, lost its shreds of worth, in my view, by pointing at me and presumably the world a hose pipe of opinion of General Stanley McCrystall this week. Enough bullshit, enough demagoguery from celebrities.

Oh and Huffington Post, a formerly great initiative, going down the drain: possibly interesting serious material now interspersed with celebrity cleavage and thigh revelations. Remove from phone. I can get enough of that in many doctors' waiting rooms!

The 'App' is the poison, the means to more quickly vanish into mindlessness, or to avoid prospect of elevating oneself from mindlessness, to ensure succinctification of the bullshit. Up from the merde let me struggle now. Before the depth turns all the lights out.

I will still look to The Guardian for reassurance that there are some sane people, so reflective thinkers, some independent minded editors out there.

world refugee day

20 June is World Refugee Day.

But in Australia the issue is clouded by ignorance, alarm and bigotry, in a smog of muck running up to September elections, (clearer information here and here) a state of mind growing like a cancer, generated in the days when Lynton Crosby taught the suburban solicitor John Howard (not this one, but this one, this one) to be a global strutsman praising greed and selfishness and pulling apart the infrastructures of social decency, not least in relation to refugees.

Let us note that yes, 40000 people have arrived in Australia by boat seeking refugee status, since the current government took office, but we need also to note that that is less than 0.1% of the total number of refugees in the world today. We are at the low end of refugees per person. And while yes, certainly, we need to have control entry to Australia, we have to do it with decency and sensible national discussion, currently politically denied.

Sculpture

This blog reflected my main distractions from whatever else I thought I should be doing over the last several years. I remained conscious that I was not recording one important area of my thoughts—on sustainable living and building a food forest in the suburbs. 

And then I started my blog on that subject... and sure enough the issue arises as to where a report should go, this blog or that. I've just begun something sculptural, because it's going in the garden, the other blog wins. Here's a link to the story. The story over there will explain that the indigo is from the photoshop air brush, to see whether that's appropriate.