Remember your wits

By: Paul Cella (Diary)  |  February 17th at 02:57 PM  | 

I have heard and read a lot of panic and resignation out there. On the edges of it are despair. Hedge fund operators talk of the new economy of canned food and ammunition, and buying farmland in Canada. Normal family men evidence a peculiar despondency, retreating from the world. What is this? Today is the last day to capitulate to despair. Today is the last | Read More »

Open Thread: no Idiot Wind.

By: Paul Cella (Diary)  |  January 5th at 03:42 PM  | 

The tedium of the commentary on the Middle East sort of resembles Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind: Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb, Blowing through the curtains in your room. Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth, You’re an idiot, babe. It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe. I myself doubt that there will ever be peace in | Read More »

Notes on the crisis

By: Paul Cella (Diary)  |  December 13th at 04:12 PM  | 

I’m standin’ in the shadows with an aching heart I’m lookin’ at the world, tear itself apart — Bob Dylan, “Mississippi” Here Dylan has given us a brilliant summation of the condition of the simple citizen in the face of the economic crisis that exploded in our faces in mid-September, and which may well prove more momentous than another calamity, another September, seven years earlier. | Read More »