John Harvey on Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"

Wow! 14,000 feet in a dust devil, in an Aeronca? I like this kind of flying. It is why I wanted to fly gliders in the first place. I wanted to be immersed in the atmosphere, not just blasting through it. And frankly, I wanted something more environmentally responsible than powered flight. An aerotow just takes about one gallon. Now we have self-launching electric gliders, the wave of the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAVF9dAQZgs So beautiful, and love that music too... Back to basics! You can still smell the grass on the runway. You can't even see the thermals, you have to find them. It's you and the sky. Have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii7IftronyM Flying used to be a thing to love. Now it's a thing to tolerate to get somewhere else where they also have a McDonalds. This is what modern society has lost. We had a beautiful thing, and we lost it. We lost something important. No wonder we are in trouble. This is it! The cybernetics is an attempt to figure our way out of this mess. But it will be irrelevant if the house burns down first. Time to pull the fire alarm. Joni: "We paved Paradise, and put up a parking lot." Elon: "What Paradise, we are off to Mars." My relatives living in Stockholm have so far avoided the American fate. They think we have lost our minds, and I agree. They didn't fall for the "luxury" trap the USA did, so things are simpler and more affordable. They kept their balance better. We take everything to extremes here. A bug in our software. And we came a long way from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," didn't we? We got hubris. Cry, the beloved country.