The only season I watched showed how difficult it was for people to eat enough to maintain their body weight. Most were trying to fish or eat what they found under rocks, with little success. However, there was one man who had excellent survival skills. He built a yurt, trapped an animal, and seemed like he could stay indefinitely. Although he was a successful hunter, he pointed out that doesn’t make you a competent butcher. He did the best he could in the amount of time he had before hiding what he couldn’t eat or safely preserve. Other predators in the area tended to come out at night, so he buried what was left.
In the end he tapped out because he was worried about his mother. She had been ill before the show. IIRC he decided he needed to spend more time with her.
Includes Lesson 18 from On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder.
And, ends like this:
The night before I was stopped by the police, I had been driving that truck through water. It was a time of high rain in the central United States. Highways were flooded.
In the pre-revolutionary France of the eighteenth century, decadent rulers said “après nous, le déluge” — “after us, the flood.” We care not at all about the consequences of our actions; we are here to profit so long as we can. This is the attitude of Musk, Trump, and the rest. They are in it for themselves, provoking disasters for the rest of us along the way.
A few days before that drive began, I finished my doctoral dissertation, about revolutions, based on research in post-communist Poland. One of my supervisors was the the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. Considering the task of Poland’s new democratic government, he reversed the formula of French royalty, writing: “après le deluge, nous.”
After the flood, we remain. The disaster brought by the decadent is part of the story. But it is not the conclusion. It is what we do next that matters.
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
“It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
new from @micahh.bsky.social and me: the coming years will test our resilience, but they will also offer chances to sharpen our strategies, deepen our solidarity, and expand our collective power. we must anticipate repression, and develop strategies to weather the storm.
I like the idea but re: running the business at a loss to ensure minimum tax liability, my recollection is that if a company/entity reports losses for too many years, the IRS considers it a hobby, where gross income = net income where taxes are concerned.
But I’m no tax expert & neither was the person who told me this. (The context of that discussion was why Ft. Worth’s Caravan of Dreams got less adventurous with its booking policy, so his explanation made sense.)
Whichever way has its ducks in a better row, I guess?