Loggers, a dying breed. (2 min 28 sec)

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Comment at end by Paul Watson

GONE FISHIN' (5 min 4.09 sec)

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The story piece is written by Stephen Leacock, a Canadian economist and humorist, promoter of
the idea of Guaranteed Income. The song, written by Nick Kenny/ Charles Kenny is sung by Bing and Louis.


We need not a new game but a new set of rules. There must be bread and work for all; and that ought to mean mighty little work and lots of bread.
Stephen Leacock
preface (pp. v-vi) to his only book of verse

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 86, 87, 88

A Poet's Vision of Hell

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Kathleen Jamie



It seems an odd way to structure a free society: Most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week for 45 years. Doesn't sound much like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Sounds like a nation of drones.

It used to be that one's compensation for being an American drone was the freedom to live in one's own house, in one's own quirky way, in a clean and safe community in which your children had the chance to be happier, richer drones than you. But working stiffs can't afford houses now, fewer communities are clean, none are safe, and your kid's prospects are worse.(This condition may be because for five days a week, for 45 years, you had no say - while other people have been making decisions that haven't been good for you.) I'm not sure whose happiness we've been pursuing lately, but one thing is clear: It's not the happiness of those who've done our society's
work.
Michael Ventura


I found youth hostels packed with 25 to 35-year-olds –
all, like me, defectors from respectable jobs: lawyers,
public servants, environmental scientists. My
international comrades in arms. We didn’t know where
we were going, but we knew what we were escaping
from ... Since my return I’ve found that all my peers are
running off to careers as counsellors or New Age quacks
with crystal balls. There’s soul searching and aptitude
testing. We’re convinced that somewhere between the
school yard and the office building with the talking lift,
we’ve missed the correct turn-off ... Everyone I know
seems to be going part-time, casual and short-term, so
they can write the TV script, do the photography course,
finish their masters.

Why are we gambling with the weekly pay cheque? Why
are we opting for the insecurity that puts mortgages and
shopping malls beyond our reach? … It’s a personal
rebellion against the corporate ethic of 44-hour days
and box-ticking performance appraisals; against the
subtle, soul-destroying conditioning of the paranoid, air-
conditioned workplace. We’ve read the writing on the
wall …There’s no such thing as a job for life. So why not
put life first and let jobs and careers come and go?
Julie Szego
A Journey without Corporate Baggage:
How Generation X is
rebelling against the modern work ethic


NYT Quote Of The Day, July 31, 2006
"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me."
Alan Beggerow,
an unemployed steelworker, on why he has not found another job.



Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night — consuming two or three books a week — many more than in his working years.

He also gets more sleep, regularly more than nine hours, a characteristic of men without work. As the months pass, they average almost nine-and-a-half hours a night, about 80 minutes more than working men, according to an analysis of time-use surveys by Harley Frazis and Jay Stewart, economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Very few of the books Mr. Beggerow reads are novels, and certainly not the escapist Westerns that he himself writes (two in the last five years), his hope being that someday he will interest a publisher and earn some money. His own catholic tastes range over history — currently the Bolshevik revolution and a biography of Charlemagne — as well as music and the origins of
Christianity.

He often has strong views about what he has just read, which he expresses in reviews that he posts on Amazon.com: 124 so far, he said. Always on the coffee table is a thick reference work, “Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire” by Maurice Hinson. Mr. Beggerow is a serious pianist now that he has the time to practice, sometimes two or three hours at a stretch. He does so on an old upright in a corner of the living room, a piano he purchased as a young steelworker, when he first took lessons.
from
Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job
By LOUIS UCHITELLE and DAVID LEONHARDT
NYT
July 31, 2006

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 85

As its economic importance wanes, work's control function comes to the fore. Work, like the state, is an institution for the control of the many by the few. It pre-empts most of our waking hours. It's often physically or mentally enervating. For most people it involves protracted daily direct submission to authority on a scale otherwise unknown to adults who are not incarcerated. Work wrings the energy out of workers, leaving just enough for commuting and consuming. This implies that democracy -- if by this is meant some sort of informed participation by a substantial part of the population in its own governance -- is -illusory.
Bob Black,
reviewing
The End Of Work: The Decline Of The Global Labor Force And The Dawn Of The Post-Market Era
By Jeremy Rifkin

Writers chat: what are marital fights about?

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Moyers interviews Lapham

Stephen Colbert on Class Warfare

Stephen Colbert, Wall of Poor

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 85

Kingfish Barbecue

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The 125 million people of America have seated themselves at the barbecue table to consume the products which have been guaranteed to them by their Lord and Creator. There is provided by the Almighty what it takes for them all to eat; yea, more. There is provided more than what is needed for all to eat. But the financial masters of America have taken off the barbecue table 90 percent of the food placed thereon by God, through the labors of mankind, even before the feast begins, and there is left on that table to be eaten by 125 million people less than should be there for 10 million of them.

What has become of the remainder of those things placed on the table by the Lord for the use of us all? They are in the hands of the Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Baruches, the Bakers, the Astors, and the Vanderbilts--600 families at the most either possessing or controlling the entire 90 percent of all that is in America. They cannot eat the food, they cannot wear the clothes, so they destroy it. They have it rotted; they plow it up; they pour it into the rivers; they bring destruction through the acts of mankind to let humanity suffer; to let humanity go naked; to let humanity go homeless, so that nothing may occur that will do harm to their vanity and to their greed. Like the dog in the manger, they command a wagon load of hay, which the dog would not allow the cow to eat, though he could not eat it himself.
Huey P. Long, 1934

go see postsecret.com

Alfred Hitchcock, use-value for manufactured products

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Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 83, 84

The happy professional processional

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check out Jeff Schmidt's adventure with this book

read his intro


Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing—to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having a coffee—because whoever can do nothing, letting his [sic] thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself.
Sebastian de Grazia



In African life, a person creates, produces, and makes time - "as much time as he [sic] wants". It is possible in technological society to waste time. So westerners, viewing an apparently idle African through the wrong lens, fail to see what time means here: "Those who are seen sitting down, are actually not wasting time, but either waiting for time or in the process of 'producing' time." Waiting for time? Even better, producing time? What harried citizen of a technological culture could resist the seductive appeal of this prospect? All we have to do is think differently, and then, as we sit idle, watching the clouds, we might become little factories, manufacturing time for ourselves. All the time we need, all the time there is.
James Gleick