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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
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$1 in 1939 equals about $18 today
How can we deal with the national debt, soon all the taxes we collect will be need just to pay the interest?
I know kids, lets get off the gold standard, clean up that old building over there, call it the Federal Reserve Bank and print more money!
I had a piece on my blog last year on “Fifty is the new twenty”. I kept a twenty tucked up over the visor in the car, just in case.
Then last year my girlfriend and I went down to the beach to watch the sunset and on the way back had the urge to stop for a beer each and a small shared appetizer. But my wallet was still at the house and the twenty from the car didn’t cover the tab, even with five bucks in quarters from the stash for tolls.
Now I tuck fifty up there.
Public telephone. Operator, give me PR5-1325. That’s PRimrose5-1325 for you kids. That was my Grandparent’s actual phone # and you couldn’t dial direct. Ours was SE2-5183, or SElden2-5183.
Good times….
That 79 cent wind up alarm clock would probably still be working today is someone hadn’t thrown it away for a cool new digital one that cost $15 and required 2 AA batteries and then gets thrown in the landfill a year later.
A dollar in 1912 was worth a dollar but today it is worth 3 cents.
Said another way, that which cost a dollar in 1912 costs 97 dollars today.
Where’d it all go?
On a 1950’s Perry Mason episode last night the dood told Perry he kept $5000 in his home safe and Perry asked if he always kept that large amount on hand. My wife remarked that $5000 isn’t THAT much and I reminded her that $5k in 1955 was about $50k today. In 2055 that $5k will be $200k. (it’s exponential, in case you were wondering)
When I worked at McDonalds in 1970 a Big Mac cost 45 cents and sales tax was 4%, how much are they today? You could buy 5 hamburgers, at 19 cents each, and get change back from a dollar. How do you cure a thieving gov’t?
Large Box Bath Powder $0.09
Ebay today. 3 pack bath powder. Japan $0.99
NYC subway: 1972…25cents, 2019…$2.75.
Ten times higher.
minimum wage: 1972.. $1.50, 2019…$15.00
Volkswagen: 1972..$1,300.00, 2019…$30,000??
Certainly brings back memories. Our medium sized town had a well stocked Five and Dime, complete with a lunch counter. If it wasn’t there, you could probably find it at the Woolworth’s—complete with its trademark wood floor. If anything was marked “Made in Japan”, back on the shelf it went. for that was synonymous with junk. No worries though, as so little wasn’t made in the good old USA. What a time it was—late 50’s up to the hippie era, which was the beginning of the end.
Who broke the Merry-go-round?
https://tinyurl.com/y245jx38
Dollar stores are the five-and-dimes of today.
@Richard, the noninflationary version:
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy–Pori1NL6fKm2SnY/The%20Creature%20From%20Jekyll%20Island_djvu.txt
pdf –
https://ia802609.us.archive.org/14/items/pdfy–Pori1NL6fKm2SnY/The%20Creature%20From%20Jekyll%20Island.pdf
Ooh, I haven’t read that Patricia Wentworth!
Don’t know the rest of those books.
I second (or third, or fourth, or whatever) The Creature from Jekyll Island. It is one of the most influential books I’ve read, to the point that I bought copies for each of my children as well as my brother. None of them have read it, but I’ve tried.
Regarding the inflation of our currency, I’m no economist, but the Adjusted Monetary Base is just about the scariest chart I’ve ever seen.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=nWyb
We all know that we went through a crisis in 2008. Banks were closing, and the value of your home, your 401k and other investment accounts took a hit. Since then, things have recovered….or at least we’re supposed to believe that they have. Yes, things aren’t crashing like they were 11 years ago, but look at that chart closely. The AMB is now roughly 4 times what it was in 2008. Has the value of your home or 401k quadrupled? Mine has improved, but not to that degree, and I don’t think I’m alone. If the value of your assets hasn’t kept up with the increase in the number of dollars, then you haven’t recovered. I’m just an amateur, but I think that we’re in a deflationary period that they’re (“The Fed, The Powers That Be, Whoever”) are trying to mask by increasing the number of dollars in the system dramatically.
I like to think that if you flip that chart upside down, that will tell you the value of the dollar in your pocket.
Vitamin G!
The illustration on the cover of the “Fingers of Fear” paperback looks alarmingly like the alien characters in the Roddy Piper classic Sci-Fi film, “They Live”, where humans were turned into mindless consumers by the alien’s hidden subliminal suggestions.