A lot of time and effort with this book would help avoid "AI" marketing hype and text...

> A good diction takes work. It exploits the natural but does not come naturally. It demands a wary eye for the way meanings sprout, and it demands the courage to prune. It has the warmth of human concern. It is a cut about the commonplace,a cut bout the inaccuracies and circumlocutions of speech, yet within easy reach. Clarity is the first aim; economy, the second; grace, the third; dignity the fourth. Our writing should be a little strange, a little bit out of the ordinary, a little beautiful, with words and phrases not met every day but seeming as right and natural as grass. A good diction takes care and cultivation.

--- Sheridan Baker The Practical Stylist

#SheridanBaker #PracticalStylist #WritersVoice #GoodDiction #WritingStyle

- archive.org/details/practicals…

There really is only one mention of "invisible hand" in Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations and it reads like opposition to multinational "Free Trade"...

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3300/…

#AdamSmith #WealthofNations #国富論
#自由貿易反対 #InvisibleHand highly qualified..
#invisibleFoot

... Winner wasn't even predicting the future. He was just describing what was already happening and noting where it would obviously lead. He saw the media mergers and asked the question nobody in the industry wanted to answer: what happened to the predicted collapse of large centralized structures in the age of electronic media? Where, exactly, did the decentralization go? He saw that the cyberlibertarians were going to deliver the opposite of everything they promised, and that they were going to keep getting paid to promise it anyway.

matduggan.com/the-intolerable-…

#MattDuggan #LangdonWinner #CorporatePR #CorporateIndividualism 🤮🤢🤕

... and 3,500 US diplomatic personnel were either deployed elsewhere or given permission to flee for their lives. Other sources put diplomatic evacuees at up to 4,000. The State Department helped another 9,000 American civilians flee the region. This statistic shows an incredible exodus of American diplomats, businessmen and others from a region dominated and sometimes occupied by the US in recent decades. One State Department observer called it “unprecedented.” Even in the last days of the US presence in South Vietnam as the latter was falling, less than a thousand US diplomats were spirited out of the country.

juancole.com/2026/09/pentagon-…
#JuanCole #USIranWar #USADiplomats

Rule By Cringe: Cringacracy !?

... the New York real estate buffoon who used 9/11 to aggrandize his property’s height would become America’s president.
Trump made certain to note that his building “actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest.” Like Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Trump then took his own 9/11 victory lap. “When they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest,” he observed of 40 Wall Street. “And now it’s the tallest.” Like innumerable Trump statements in the 25 years since, it was callous and cringe-worthy and, of course, untrue. Nearby 70 Pine Street was actually taller.
...
theintercept.com/2026/09/11/bi…

archive.md/0mq7H

#NickTurse #RuleByCringe #NYC911 #uspol

In the absence of a miraculous baby boom or politically unpopular mass immigration, a growing number of experts urge a gradual downsizing. Takao Komine, senior researcher at the Japan Center for Economic Research, a think tank, is among those calling for “smart shrink”, a strategy in which population decline is assumed and public services are consolidated and made more efficient.
Local governments are already retooling housing, transport and welfare for the elderly. Toyama city has built a light-rail transit system designed for older people and subsidises housing construction around its stations. It has heavily invested in a care centre that has helped tug people back to the city centre, raising property prices and taxes. The care centre is built on the site of a primary school that closed in 2004.
Toyama and Nanmoku are at the vanguard of what Matanle calls a “turning point in human history”. The number of over-60s in the world passed one billion in 2019. By 2050 it will be 2.1 billion, according to the World Health Organisation, and the populations of 85 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, will be shrinking. “The global population will peak around 50 years from now, in about 2070 or so, and then decline continuously from there. There’s very little we can do about it now,” says Matanle. Everybody should be watching what happens in Japan. This is their future.

irishtimes.com/world/asia-paci…

#DavidMcNeil #PopulationDecline #JapanPopulation #JapanInaka

irishtimes.com/world/asia-paci…

Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches
on every side, there is no other place
to turn. Dawning in your veins
Is the light of the blast
that will print your shadow on stone
In a last antic of despair
to survive you in the dark.
Man has put his history to sleep
In the engine of doom. It flies
over his dreams in the night,
a blazing cocoon. O gaze into the fire
and be consumed with man’s despair,
and be still, and wait. And then see
the world go on with the patient work
of seasons, embroidering birdsong
upon itself as for a wedding, and feel
your heart set out in the morning
like a young traveler, arguing the world
from the kiss of a pretty girl.
It’s the time’s discipline to think
of the death of all living, and yet live.

--- A Discipline, by Wendell Berry

dandelionhouse.org/in-the-hear…

#WendellBerry #ADiscipline
See #CamusOnDespair #NoLitOfDespair

アメリカスズカケノ 福禄寿

... an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it.
There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.
by Wendell Berry

upaya.org/wp-content/uploads/2…

journeywithjesus.net/poemsandp…

mindfulnessassociation.net/wor…

#WendellBerry #TheSycamore #SelfHealingTree #PlatanusOccidentalis

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

#WendellBerry #WendellBerryPoem #Poetry
/HT Theo the Catholic worker on FB
facebook.com/share/p/1J8furPQB…

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

#WendellBerry #WendellBerryPoem #Poetry
/HT Theo the Catholic worker on FB
facebook.com/share/p/1J8furPQB…

Helen Morales, author of “Pilgrimage to Dollywood,” gave us a stern directive – look at the lyrics! So we dive into Dolly’s discography, starting with the early period of what Dolly calls “sad ass songs” to find remarkably prescient words of female pain, slut-shaming, domestic violence, and women being locked away in asylums by cheating husbands. We explore how Dolly took the centuries-old tradition of the Appalachian “murder ballad”—an oral tradition of men singing songs about brutally killing women—and flipped the script, singing from the woman’s point of view. And as her career progresses, the songs expand beyond the pain to tell tales of leaving abuse behind.

wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly…

#DollyParton # SadAssedSongs
#HelenMorales #Dollywood

"Since the international arrivals inspection is an administrative function, CBP policy and federal regs do not permit the presence of lawyers during secondary examinations," CBP spokesman Stephen Sapp tells me. In other words, when I'm under an administrative rather than a criminal investigation, I have fewer rights than someone accused of a crime.
Sitting back down in the waiting room, I saw another American waiting with his foreign wife, and asked to use his phone to text my lawyer. My lawyer told me to hang tight, because as an American, they have to let me in eventually. (Unfortunately, there is no legal limit to how long "eventually" can be.) He was also busy reassuring my wife, who was sitting in baggage claims asking herself, Where can they possibly deport my husband? New Jersey?
reason.com/2026/08/20/border-c…

#ReasonCom #IceThugs #USACBP
#USAImmigration

We need, by contrast, an educational culture in which it is good simpliciter, in and of itself, for humans to read, think, converse, wonder and ask, if for no other reason than the intrinsic value of such activities—or that such activities are, in and of themselves, sources of delight and joy, ingredient in human flourishing. When a human intelligence does these things, it cannot, by definition, be superseded or replaced by A.I., even if A.I. can simulate those things better and faster than humans can generate them.
... this is not an elitist account of intellectual virtue. As intended here, “excellence” does not mean how well one does the activity relative to other intellects; rather, the virtue lies in the doing of the activity, regardless of the relative sophistication. On this model, the genius and the simpleton can both be equally virtuous intellectually; the child reading a primer and the scholar reading a tome are equally excellent.

... As “Magnifica Humanitas” asserts: “We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity” (No. 126). But such goods are not the essential goal of intellectual virtue.

americamagazine.org/faith-and-…

#AISalami #IntellectualVirtues #AlfieKohnThinking #MagnificaHumanitas ##SalamiAI

Texas has become the epicenter of the United States’ current obsession with constructing AI data centers. Companies are exploiting regulatory loopholes as they construct new facilities powered by pollutant-spewing onsite gas plants.
The rate of growth of this “shadow grid” of custom power plants, some of which are big enough to fuel entire cities, is so enormous that the only global entity installing more gigawatts of gas plants than Texas is China, according to environmental group Global Energy Monitor.

futurism.com/artificial-intell…
/HT
ani.social/post/35733042
#AIはむだ #AISalami #SalamiAI