Monday, August 04, 2008

It's The Rich What Gets The Pleasure






Polly Toynbee meets the rich. Again, the equality gap raises it's ugly head; the focus of the article is not on facts and figures though, it is about the opinions that extremely hard working drivers of the economy hold. Anyone who reads football message boards will experience a depressing feeling of deja when they read the stunning vacuity of some of the statements.

Another addendum regarding the Don Easton book: don't bother with it!

Many of my favourite writers (the ones who aren't American anyway) are Scots and thanks to the wonders of the web one of my favourite papers is the Sunday Herald and my favourite radio programme is a Scottish one. I have wondered here before how it is that Scotland can consistently produce such great artists while Wales can't and neither can my dear beloved Brum. I have wondered why Brum, in particular, with it's immense size, history and multiculturalism can't produce art in the same way that Scotland can. Well, the old place isn't as shit as I had come to believe.

Here we go, another Guardian link, this one to an article by a Zen nun. Reading that I thought about how I took up yoga a few years ago and via the meditations that end the sessions explored meditative techniques and came to Buddhism. I must stress that I am not a practising Buddhist, very far from it, but I try to incorporate tenets of Buddhism into my daily life. From various Buddhist readings I came across positive psychology and the "new science of happiness", neither of which particularly convince me, but are interesting nonetheless. Which is a long winded way of introducing The Happiness Project.

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