“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper deposit in Yellowstone Park, I’d recommend mining it. Proper use of minerals is essential. You have to go get them where they are. Our standard of living is based on this.”
“For a fifty-year cycle, yes. But for the long term, no. We have to drop our standard of living, so that people a thousand years from now can have any standard of living at all.”
A breeze coming off the nearby acres of snow felt cool but not chilling in the sunshine, and rumpled the white hair of the two men.
“I am not for penalizing people today for the sake of future generations,” Park said.
“I really am,” said Brower. “That’s where we differ.”
— John McPhee, from Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). Think how often this debate has been repeated, and in how many different cultural and economic contexts, in the decades since this conversation took place.
The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory:
This article presents this phenomenon of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate themselves and freely participate in public life. To fortify our shared knowledge against that epistemic threat, the article reintroduces the background and substance of the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online (2024), which came to inspire the Our Future Memory campaign’s growing global coalition. That framework asserts that memory institutions must have practical options and legal protections to undertake four basic practices with digital materials that they were previously allowed to do with physical ones: (1) collection, (2) preservation, (3) access, and (4) collaboration.
Watched: Lumière, Le Cinéma! What an absolute delight: a series of more than 100 early (1890s) films by the Lumière brothers — each 50 seconds long — beautifully restored and commented on. Louis Lumière was an absolute genius of composition, and I could watch his tiny movies all day. 🍿
The problem with the theory of the “uni-context” is that it’s an explanation of the behavior of Extremely Online People masquerading as an account of “everyone” or “the world.” Extremely Online People are like strong secularists: they think they’re more common than they are, and they believe that the whole world is trending in their direction.
Absolute tactical idiocy by Tuchel. Argentina have far too much quality: if you allow them to have as many free shots from 20 meters as they want, one (or more) of them will go in. 🏴-🇦🇷
UPDATE: someone writing in to the Guardian made my point at greater length:
England didn’t just go defensive, they sat in their box. This wasn’t a Ghana-style immaculately coached shutting off of all passing lanes, this was a stand in a line and see if a team can score. Fernandez had had three previous shots not closed down from that sort of range. At some point he was going to beat Pickford. Argentina had done exactly that corner routine twice before. Argentina had been allowed to cross the ball in multiple times from exactly that area and had hit both posts and Pickford had made two really good saves. Against Norway, Tuchel was angry because England weren’t repetitive enough; well. against Argentina they allowed the same two patterns of play over and over and over again. What did they expect?
Don’t park the bus, England. DO NOT DO IT. You will pay. 🏴-🇦🇷
Watched: Eno. What a wonderful documentary: an idea-generative film about a master of generative art. 🍿
Back cover of the forthcoming.
In my previous post I used the line “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.” It’s a line I've been using for fifty years, since I heard Billy Crystal deploy it in a routine on Saturday Night Live in which he portrayed an old jazzman called Face.
Crystal’s routine was based on people he knew from his childhood, jazz musicians who came into the Commodore Music Shop on 42nd Street in Manhattan:
That’s Billy Crystal’s father Jack in the plaid shirt on the right. Larger image here.
