[h2]1932 Essay{/h2]

The world at the present day is suffering from two misfortunes : there are people who desire goods which they cannot purchase, and there are people who have goods which they cannot sell. Those who have goods which they cannot sell are adopting various ingenious means of disposing of their surplus.

Brazil, which suffers from a surplus of coffee, has taken to using it as fuel on the railways and to burning it on large funeral pyres in lonely valleys. There is a glut of rubber, which is unfortunately made worse by the fact that the natives cannot be restrained from tapping the rubber trees. Fortunately rubber trees are subject to a pest, which has hitherto been combated but which is now about to be encouraged. The world's cotton crop has, in the past, been threatened by the boll weevil, but now the boll weevil is welcomed as a friend, since it helps to prevent overproduction of cotton.

Nobody has thought for a moment that it might be a good thing if somebody could enjoy the produce of human labour. Our morality is ascetic, which makes us regard work as a virtue; it follows that production is good and consumption is bad. This ascetic twist has produced a world system in which half the world is poor because it produces too much and the other half because it consumes too little.

What is the cure for this queer insanity?...

... It seems clear that to improve trade, we must find some way of bringing goods to those who want them. So far, however, the collective wisdom of mankind has not been equal to this effort. People not yet in asylums suggest that the cure for unemployment due to overproduction is to be sought in longer hours. I think it is clear that to start the economic machine again working normally it will be necessary no longer to demand that each operation should at each moment be profitable. There is food rotting in the West of the United States and Canada; there are unemployed populations starving in all the industrial regions throughout the world. If the food were brought to the starving populations, and they were set to work such as would satisfy the wants of Western farmers, the world would be the richer even if no individual capitalist made a profit.The motive of individual profit has apparently broken down, and only organised public effort will restore the economic life of the world.

- russell-j.com/GO-MAD.HTM

#BertrandRussel #RusselOnEconomy #RusselOnEconomicSystem #FruitsSystem #SystemFuits #GoingMad?

1939 Novel

>

The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. A Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was released in 1940. ^1

Quotes

Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge, and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights. These men work carefully and endlessly to perfect the seed, theroots. And there are the men of chemistry who spray the trees against pests, who sulphur the grapes, who cut out disease and rots, mildews and sicknesses. Doctors of preventive medicine, men at the borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle, men who quarantine the sick trees and root them out and burn them, men of knowledge. The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon's job, as tender and delicate; and these men must have surgeons' hands and surgeons' hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.

....

The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

- ^1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grap…

#GrapesOfWrath #FruitsSystem #SteinbeckOnEconomy #SteinbeckOnEconomicSystem

1939 novel by John Steinbeck

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

One flight attendant said he kept waiting for the sports teams his new bosses had talked about as he flew deportation routes. “You know, the NFL charters, the NBA charters, whatever the hockey one is …” he said.
...
They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?
...
“We have never gotten a clear answer on what we do in an ICE Air evacuation,” another said. “They will not give us an answer.”
They were reminded, over and over, that their job was a vocation, one with a professional code: No matter who the passengers were, flight attendants were in charge of the cabin, responsible for safety in the air.
...
Lala had been scared before her first deportation flight, worried that violence might break out. But fear soon gave way to discomfort at how detainees were treated. “Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think that was right,” she said.
...
Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)
...
The guards often asked flight attendants to heat up the food they brought from home. They asked for drinks, for ice. “They treated us like we were their maids,” said Akilah Sisk, a former flight attendant from Texas.
“In their eyes, the detainees are not the passengers,” another flight attendant said. “The passengers are the guards. And we’re there for the guards.”
...
Nothing bothered flight attendants more than the fact that most of their passengers were in chains. What would happen if a flight had to be evacuated?
...
Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.
To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.

propublica.org/article/inside-…

#ICEChartetFlights #uspol #immigration

... By the end of his first term, Trump was ready to call it quits on the sputtering war in Somalia, ordering almost all U.S. troops out of the country in late 2020.
The withdrawal was reversed by President Joe Biden but the tiny ISIS-Somalia faction remains “a significant threat to peace and security in Somalia,” while the larger militant group, al-Shabab, “continues to carry out complex attacks...
AFRICOM did not respond to requests for clarification about why it took 60 tons of bombs to kill less than 15 militants,
April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”

The Intercept’s investigation revealed that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but has not received a response.

theintercept.com/2025/05/23/la…
#NickTurse #Africom #Somalia #TrumpPentagon

In dreams begins responsibity.

夢の中で責任が始まる

- eigomeigen.com/quotes/4780.php

#英語名言 #イェイッツ #夢と責任 #WilliamButlerYeats #イェイツの名言

無用の用 The usefulness of the useless..

It's been a few years since I ask classes of 40 to 80 students for the meaning of "Don Quijote". They tell me it's a store. My question was intstigated by the extra (Not on the test!! just for your enjoyment if you finish quick) reading on the back side of a worksheet. While discussing proverbs in comparison with science, literature, and slang Bertrand Russel mentions Sancho Panza.^1

Sancho Panza produced more proverbs than any other character in fiction

サンチョ・パンザは、他の小説の主人公の誰よりも多くの諺を創りだした。

Bertrand Russel also refers to Don Quijote to illustrate a type of thinking.^2

The classic example of subjectivity is Don Quixote. The first time he made a helmet, he tested its capacity for resisting blows, and battered it out of shape ; next time he did not test it, but “deemed” it to be a very good helmet.

Don Quijote illustrates "subjectivity" in On Education in 1925, and decades later Albert Camus's Myth of Sisyphus uses Quijote thinking to illustrate the difference between "lyricism" and "truism":

... there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.... If Faust and Don Quixote are eminent creations of art, this is because of the immeasurable nobilities they point out to us with their earthly hands. Yet a moment always comes when the mind negates the truths that those hands can touch....

- ^1 russell-j.com/PROVERB.HTM
- ^2 russell-j.com/wp/archives/2640
- russell-j.com/beginner/OE16-07…
- ^3 pixelfed.social/bobfisherphoto
- pixelfed.social/p/bobfisherpho…
- pixelfed.social/i/web/post/828…

#BertrandRussel #AlbertCamus #MethodsOfThought #TypesOfThinking
#RusselWithQuijote #CamusWithQuijote

"I read a really great phrase recently that said something along the lines of 'why would I bother to read something someone couldn't be bothered to write' and that is such a powerful statement and one that aligns absolutely with my views."
..
"If you want to know why a decision is made, we will need humans. If we don't care about that, then we will probably use AI," he says.
...
"Even when you do a Google search it includes an AI overview, while some emails have a topline summary, So now it almost feels like we have no control. How do I turn all that off? It's snowballing."
bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzd…
#SabineZetteler
#AISalami #SalamiAI

> All Crimean War hospitals were ghastly, she insists, and the statistics suggest that at least two had higher death rates than Scutari. McDonald also makes a persuasive case that Nightingale believed the blame for Scutari’s dreadful state lay elsewhere. In her letters, she pointed repeatedly at military doctors and administrators, chastising them for a host of “murderous” errors including sending cholera cases to overcrowded wards and delaying having the hospital “drained and ventilated.” The sanitary commission’s investigation confirmed Nightingale’s suspicions about the links between filth and disease, McDonald contends, and she became determined never to let those conditions occur again. “That is the foundation of all she does in public health for the rest of her life,” McDonald says...

> Throughout her sojourn, she faced the resentment of officers and bureaucrats who regarded her as an interloper. “There is not an official who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he could,” Nightingale wrote from Crimea, “but they know that the War Office cannot turn me out because the country is with me.”

- smithsonianmag.com/history/the…

#FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheLamp #LadyOfTheHammer #Scutari
@bsmall2

The Defiance of Florence Nightingale

Scholars are finding there’s much more to the “lady with the lamp” than her famous exploits as a nurse in the Crimean War

^{Smithsonian Magazine}